I'm going to give a very brief article about improving the PHP setup that comes with Tiger. This is a two step operation:

1. Install Marc Liyanage's PHP
2. Install Eaccelerator

I will do some basic benchmarking using phpMyadmin and ab.

Default Setup
If you are interested in the default PHP performance I ran the ab program on the phpMyAdmin main page and got the following results:




As you can see it took 4.317 seconds to call the homepage 20 times, with the following command:

ab -n 20 http://localhost/~wfm/myadmin/

It is also worth noting:
4.63 requests per second, and transfer rate of 15Kb/sec.

Download the appropriate version of PHP, which is probably PHP 4 on Mac OS X 10.3/10.4. Follow the usual instructions for installing a software package, it should be fairly straightforward.

Using a text editer such as Text Wrangler copy and past the following code, then save it in your Sites folder as info.php:

<?PHP
phpinfo();
?>


Make sure you have websharing enabled, then go to the following URL in your browser:
http://localhost/~username/info.php
You should see something like the following:

For the next step you need to have Apple Developer Tools installed, and be familiar with using the terminal.

Copy and paste the following URL into your broswer and download to your Desktop:
http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/eaccelerator/eaccelerator-0.9.3.tar.gz

Open the terminal and running the following commands:

cd ~/Desktop
tar -zxvf eaccelerator-0.9.3.tar.gz
cd eaccelerator-0.9.3
/usr/local/php/bin/phpize
./configure --enable-eaccelerator=shared \ --with-php-config=/usr/local/php/bin/php-config (all one line)
make
sudo make install
sudo pico /usr/local/php/lib/php.ini

Copy and paste the following text to the end of the file:

extension="/usr/local/php/lib/php/extensions/
no-debug-non-zts-20020429/eaccelerator.so" (all one line)
eaccelerator.shm_size="16"
eaccelerator.cache_dir="/tmp/eaccelerator"
eaccelerator.enable="1"
eaccelerator.optimizer="1"
eaccelerator.check_mtime="1"
eaccelerator.debug="0"
eaccelerator.filter=""
eaccelerator.shm_max="0"
eaccelerator.shm_ttl="0"
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period="0"
eaccelerator.shm_only="0"
eaccelerator.compress="1"
eaccelerator.compress_level="9"

Quite and save

Run the following commands:

mkdir /tmp/eaccelerator
chmod 0777 /tmp/eaccelerator


Restart Apache with the following command:

sudo apachectl restart

Copy the file eaccelerator.php to your Sites directory

cp eaccelerator.php ~/Sites/


To test this has worked go to:
http://localhost/~username/info.php
and you should see the following:

Now, do we actually get better performance ?

Running the above exact same benchamrk I get the following:

• Total time taken is now: 2.923 compared to 4.317
• Requests/sec is now 6.84 compared to 4.63
• Transfer Rate of 22.52Kb/sec comapred to 15Kb/sec

An improvment ? I think so.


The real benefit of Eacclerator is that it is and optimizer and a cache. What it actually does is to tweak the PHP source code at run time, and then cache the compiled binary. As soon as any changes are made to the PHP code, Eaccelerator notices this and grabs the latest copy.
Let's hit the cache again
Running the same test again gives the following results:

• Total time taken is now: 2.132 compared to 4.317
• Requests/sec is now 9.38 compared to 4.63
• Transfer Rate of 30.88Kb/sec comapred to 15Kb/sec

If you followed my steps above and copied the file eaccelerator.php to you Sites folder you should be able to go to the following URL:
http://localhost/~username/eaccelerator.php