eAccelerator

eAccelerator

by jonnym m -
Number of replies: 7

eAcellerator I just a few thoughts about eAcellerator. I’m not a server tech but I do dabble, so all the following might be inaccurate and I’m always willing to bow to greater knowledge.

I followed Frankie Kams excellent tutorial How I speeded up my Moodle site (two essential tips).

The mod deflate seems to have worked as described. Unfortunately I don’t think eAcellerator is a viable option any more.

I'm running on a cloud server running centOS with cpanel. I’m currently using PHP Version 5.3.18.

I tried to install the eAcelerator first using eaccelerator-0.9.6.1 and ran in to the well documented issues of it no longer being compatible. After version 0.9.5.3 they dropped support for the PHP commands used by Moodle (and other PHP software like Wordpress etc).

I then tried to install 0.9.5.3, how ever it does not seem to be available anywhere. See its absence from Github https://github.com/eaccelerator/eaccelerator/downloads, I have read about there being problems with this version so it may have been removed for this reason.

That leaves rolling back to version 0.9.5.2. During install I started to ran into problems after the 'make' command, which ended in: make: *** [optimize.lo] Error 1

I think this is due to it not being compatible with the current version of PHP.

I'm going to be looking at other options for these reasons.

  • Its already out of date and wont be updated to work with moodle
  • The old versions don't work with new versions of PHP
  • If used, every time I recompile using Easy Apache it would update the version of eAcellerator.
  • Finally I don’t want to spend time learning about software which is coming to the end of its useful life with moodle.

Its a pity as I know others have seen great gains using this eAcellerater and I really hope I’m wrong.

What do you guys think? Am I off the mark here, have I missed something?

Thanks for any help

Jonnym

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Re: eAccelerator

by jonnym m -

Interestingly this article seems to indicate that he has got it to work with eaccelerator-0.9.6.1: http://moodle.tcea.org/index.php/kory-prince

I have tried to contact him to confirm it but unfortunately his email address is out of action. I find it hard to see how he's done it as even the developers of eAcelerator say it doesn't support the PHP commands needed.

Heres hoping he has found the solution!

Jonnym

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Re: eAccelerator

by Mathew Gancarz -
Picture of Core developers

I realize this is not eAccelerator, but I've had very good performance results from using xCache as a PHP accelerator in our development environment. I am planning to try and translate that to our staging and production environment but have not tried it yet.

See: http://xcache.lighttpd.net/wiki/Introduction and http://xcache.lighttpd.net/wiki/InstallFromBinary

I was able to get it built from Source on Solaris using the instructions also provided. Configured xcache.ini based on settings here: http://xcache.lighttpd.net/browser/trunk/xcache.ini

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Re: eAccelerator

by Kory Prince -

Hello All. I am the author of the post jonnym mentioned. I can assure that the setup worked at one time, but that was over a year ago and eaccelerator has not been updated.

(Not sure why my contact info got all messed up, but that is fixed on the post now.)

In any case, I have some information that might help you now.

First of all, you should be using PHP APC. It's what is promoted by the PHP guys, and will be included in PHP one day. Futhermore at least Ubuntu and Debian have it packaged in recent versions (if not other distros) so there's no need to compile anymore.

 

Second, if you'd like more information on setting up moodle efficiently (i.e. using php-fpm and nginx instead of apache+mod_php) check out https://docs.bullardisd.net/public/cluster/moodle.html

Cheers,

Kory

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Re: eAccelerator

by jonnym m -

Hi Kory

I wasn't doubting your claims of it working, Infact I did see some improvement using the new version of eAcelerator but they were short lived.  The changes happened in the 9.6 update hence why I couldn't see how you had done it.  

It all seems like a moot point as I agree that eAcelerator is not the way to go.

I'm trialing APC now, however it isn't playing well with Moodle on my setup right now, to the point where its not loading even the log in screen.  I need to go through the settings and confirm there all correct when I get time, currently I have disabled APC.

I have cPanel on my server and installed APC through WHM Module Installers, which was fairly painless, but it does require editing the php.ini to get it started.  

Thanks for the article link...looks like I have some reading to do.

thanks for the input

Jonnym

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Re: eAccelerator

by jason everling -

We use 0.9.6.1 , we have been since we have been using moodle, not sure why you cant get it working. Its simple to install and setup, took maybe 5min to setup, make sure you have phpize installed and run it as root with the command phpize in the eaccelerator directory before you run ./configure and make. Then you just need to create the .ini file and drop into /etc/php5/conf.d/

 

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Re: eAccelerator

by jason everling -

Just an update from my last post. I recently updated our Moodle server to the latest 2.3 version and increased eAccelerator's cache to 128MB and still using 0.9.6.1 we noticed a huge increase in performance from the quizing standpoint. Before the change the average user click to the next question was 5-6secs and now it is at 1-2secs. This was with a total of 141 students taking a timed quiz. It fabulous! Im thinking of increasing to 256MB to see how many more scripts we can cache. One pointer for anyone make sure you increase your kernel shared memory before you increase eAccelerator's memory.

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