[Mediawiki-l] PHP Accelerator

[Benjamin Lees]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Patricia Barden <webmaster at prwatch.org>wrote:

> Hi all:
>
> I recently upgraded our wiki from 1.8.2 to 1.15.1 and, since the
> upgrade, the site has been white-screening at various times. Our
> hosting provider suggested this morning that there may be a
> compatibility bug between the new site code and APC. He said that PHP
> scripts were being called, but were not generating any output. He
> restarted Apache and, since then, pages seem to be loading normally.
>
> If you encounter white-screening in the future, check your webserver's
error logs or enable the display of PHP errors <
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_debug#PHP_errors>.


So, this made me curious about what PHP accelerator is recommended /
> used by MediaWiki.org -- eAccelerator, mmTurck,  or APC?
>
eAccelerator and APC are both fine.  XCache is also an option.  Wikimedia
projects use APC.  mmTurck should be considered deprecated (support for it
is gone in the new-installer branch of MediaWiki).


An article on MediaWiki.org says that, "[d]epending on the cache and
> options used, you may have to perform a special operation whenever
> updating script files." Can someone tell me what "special operation"
> means?
>
For APC, this is probably referring to apc.stat: if it's set to 0 (it
defaults to 1), you need to restart the webserver for changes to files to
take effect.