apc vs eaccelerator vs xcache

Question

Im doing research on which one of these to use and I can\'t really find one that stands out. Eaccelerator is faster than APC, but APC is better maintained. Xcache is faster

Answer 1

I tested eAccelerator and XCache with Apache, Lighttp and Nginx with a Wordpress site. eAccelerator wins every time. The bad thing is only the missing packages for Debian and Ubuntu. After a PHP update often the server doesn't work anymore if the eAccelerator modules are not recompiled.

eAccelerator last RC is from 2009/07/15 (0.9.6 rc1) with support for PHP 5.3

Answer 2

I always used APC with php 5.1 and 5.2, but I had a lot of (random) errors using APC with php 5.3: Strange blank pages, random out-of-memory errors. They all disappeared when I disabled APC. But that was no option, as it is running a high-volume website.

So I tried eaccelerator. So far it has been rock solid and the speed increase is even bigger than with APC. The APC guys really need to spend some time on bugfixing.

Answer 3

In the end I went with eAccelerator - the speed boost, the smaller memory footprint and the fact that is was very easy to install swayed me. It also has a nice web-based front end to clear the cache and provide some stats.

The fact that its not maintained anymore is not an issue for me - it works, and that's all I care about. In the future, if it breaks PHP6 (or whatever), then I'll re-evaluate my decision and probably go with APC simply because its been adopted by the PHP developers (so should be even easier to install)

Answer 4

I think APC is the way to go unless you are using Zend Optimizer on the site. APC is incompatible with Zend Optimizer so in that case you will need to go with something like eAccelerator.

Answer 5

APC segfaults all day and all night, got no experience with eAccelerator but XCache is very reliable with loads of options and constant development.

Answer 6

It may be important to point out the current stable, unstable and dev versions of each (including date):

APC

http://pecl.php.net/package/apc

dev        dev          2013-09-12
3.1.14     beta         2013-01-02
3.1.9      stable       2011-05-14

Xcache

http://xcache.lighttpd.net/

dev/3.2     dev        2013-12-13
dev/3.1     dev        2013-11-05
3.1.0       stable     2013-10-10
3.0.4       stable     2013-10-10

eAccelerator

https://github.com/eaccelerator/eaccelerator

dev         dev        2012-08-16
0.9.6-rc1   unstable   2010-01-26
0.9.5.1     stable     2007-05-16