OK…it was fun while it lasted but today I’m saying goodbye to eAccelerator…a PHP caching solution I was recommending a couple of months ago. Might be a great product in other environments but I’m having trouble with this on our XServe (Mac OS X Server 10.4.8).
When I first compiled and installed eAccelerator the performance was great. Stayed great right up until the moment ten days later when the server just wandered off into the weeds—had to hit the power button to bring it back.
System logs showed nothing (of course, when memory corrupts they rarely do). I realized the server was about a point release behind the XCode developer package on my desktop so I updated the server version and recompiled eAccelerator. It sprang to life and ran a full three weeks this time before flaking out. I was ready to give up on it and then noticed there had been a new release of the eAccelerator code so I built that version (0.9.5) and selected very safe, conservative compiler settings. Ran without incident for maybe three more weeks and then zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
I admit defeat.
I just unistalled the eAccelerator cache and will now research building an OSX version of the APC cache. My colleague who had the good fortune to meet Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) a few weeks ago told me he asked about caching and APC is what Rasmus uses.