Jeremy Milum wrote:
Has anyone used Alternative PHP Cache:
http://pecl.php.net/package/APC
with mediawiki?
We used it for a while on Wikipedia, but gave it up as we had a lot of problems with it not updating its cache, or generally getting stuffed up. That was quite a while ago so maybe it's improved since.
Then for a while we used PHP-Accelerator, which is free-as-in-beer but not open source. It did a pretty good job and was more consistent, but every once in a while it didn't update quite right. Adding methods to classes for instance sometimes mysteriously failed to work. http://www.php-accelerator.co.uk/
A few months ago we switched to Turck MMCache. I haven't noticed any problems with it, and it's open source: http://turck-mmcache.sourceforge.net/
I don't have any hard numbers handy, sorry, just offhand anecdotes.
If you want to do whole-page-view benchmarking, you might consider using the 'ab' benchmarking tool that comes with Apache. You can set it to run multiple or concurrent runs, and can set custom headers (for instance to enable gzip compression).
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)