What is PHP Accelerator and why do I need it?

PHP is considered to be a programming language with the average performance rate. So sometimes, you may run into a problem when a PHP script is not optimized or not coded efficiently enough to show good performance. PHP Accelerators are specific PHP extensions designed to improve the performance of applications/websites written in PHP.


How do they work?

In order to understand the way Accelerators work, let’s find out how PHP scripts are usually processed by an interpreter.

Here are the steps taken by the interpreter to process a usual PHP script:

1. Lexical Analysis (converts the source code from a sequence of human-readable characters into a sequence of tokens)
2. Syntax Analysis (analyzes a sequence of tokens to determine their grammatical structure)
3. Bytecode Generation (generates bytecode based on the information gathered from analyzing the source code)
4. Bytecode Execution
5. Output

In this case, the bytecode generation is handled periodically which takes a lot of time for script processing.
What Accelerator does is that it catches the generated bytecode and stores it in memory to have instant access to it during the next bytecode generation.

Below you can find a simple presentation of the process running with/without Accelerators:




What PHP Accelerators do you provide?

Currently, our Business servers are equipped with the following PHP Accelerators: xCache, eAccelerator, APC Cache.In order to enable them, you need to do the following:

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