Looking for modules to increase Apache and PHP Performance

Question

We are looking for modules that will increase performance for apache and php, we know that the fastcgi module will help our page load times, is there any other modules out there that will give us a performance increasing boost?

Thank you!

Jeff

Answer 1

Have you looked into the different caching modules available?

• Memcache http://php.net/manual/en/book.memcache.php
• APC http://php.net/manual/en/book.apc.php
• eAccelerator http://eaccelerator.net/

A more extensive list can also be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PHP_accelerators

Keep in mind that not all accelerators are made equal! Some will work better than others in certain circumstances.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Usually, the most generic way to improve site performance / page load times is with caching. There are plenty of Apache modules available that help with this, such as:

• APC
• eAccelerator
• Memcache

There's also plenty of other options available that are widely used, you could implement Nginx as a reverse proxy server or Varnish both of which will cache and subsequently serve static content, reducing the load on Apache. Although, these are slightly more complex to implement and configure than an Apache module.

All of these are great solutions but ultimately it depends where the bottlenecks are within your application. In order to implement a solid / permanent solution you really need to identify where the bottlenecks are - you may even find that the problems can be alleviated with code changes / SQL optimizations.

Answer 3

Have you measured if the performance is adequate? If it isn't, do you know where your bottlenecks are? They might be badly organized indices in your database, badly written queries, network bandwidth, ...