Make your LEMP website faster by installing eAccelerator

The other day i had a discussion with someone about how fast Java-powered website are, because the code is compiled and serving a page takes a breeze. The point of discussion was me writing code using php, which is a scripting language and compiles code on-the-fly every time you make a request to the website.

So i decided to take a little experiment involving current LEMP (php-fpm/mySQL Linode VPS host) setup for the client’s WordPress blog and add eAccelerator to it.

Before the switch i turned off WP-Cache and recorded time it took my server to produce the same page three times to get the feeling of the average:

Same thing after the install was complete, again the WP-Cache is off:

Wow! Great numbers! Got surprised even more when the host load average reduced as well from say 0.20 to 0.12, even 0.07.

How to install eAccelerator on your host:

1. Download and unpack it:

cd /usr/src
wget http://bart.eaccelerator.net/source/0.9.6.1/eaccelerator-0.9.6.1.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf eaccelerator-0.9.6.1.tar.bz2
cd eaccelerator-0.9.6.1
phpize
./configure
make
make install

2. Create a temporary folder for eAccelerator and let it write there:

mkdir /tmp/eaccelerator
chown -R www-data:www-data /tmp/eaccelerator/

3. Find your php.ini and add the following in the end:

extension="eaccelerator.so"
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"

4. Restart your php server:

/etc/init.d/php-fpm restart

That’s all! Let me know, if this helped to speed up your site.