Integrating XCache Into PHP5

By Inder Linux Server Comments Off

How to integrate XCache into PHP5 on a Fedora 8 or CentOS 5.1 system (with Apache2). From the XCache project page: “XCache is a fast, stable PHP opcode cacher that has been tested and is now running on production servers under high load.” It’s similar to other PHP opcode cachers, such as eAccelerator and APC.

Tested this on a Fedora 8 server with the IP address 192.168.1.12 where Apache2 and PHP5 are already installed and working. Apache’s default document root /var/www/html in this article is for demonstration purposes. Of course, you can use any other vhost as well, but you might have to adjust the path to the phpinfo.php file.

2 Checking PHP5’s Current State

First, before we install XCache, let’s find out about our PHP5 installation. To do this, we create the file phpinfo.php in document root /var/www/html

vi /var/www/html/phpinfo.php

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Afterwards, we call that file in a browser: http://192.168.1.12/phpinfo.php

Installing XCache

yum install php-devel

yum groupinstall ‘Development Tools’

yum groupinstall ‘Development Libraries’

Next we download and uncompress the latest XCache version:

cd /tmp
wget http://xcache.lighttpd.net/pub/Releases/1.2.2/xcache-1.2.2.tar.gz
tar xvfz xcache-1.2.2.tar.gz

Then we go to the new XCache source directory…

cd xcache-1.2.2

… and build XCache as follows:

phpize
./configure –enable-xcache
make
make install

Next we copy xcache.ini to the /etc/php.d directory:

cp xcache.ini /etc/php.d

Now we must configure XCache. The configuration options are explained here: http://xcache.lighttpd.net/wiki/XcacheIni

The least you should do is enable extension = xcache.so and disable all zend_extension lines; furthermore, set xcache.size to a size (in MB) > 0 to enable XCache:

vi /etc/php.d/xcache.ini

[xcache-common]
;; install as zend extension (recommended), normally “$extension_dir/xcache.so”
;zend_extension = /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/non-debug-non-zts-xxx/xcache.so
; zend_extension_ts = /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/non-debug-zts-xxx/xcache.so
;; For windows users, replace xcache.so with php_xcache.dll
;zend_extension_ts = c:/php/extensions/php_xcache.dll
;; or install as extension, make sure your extension_dir setting is correct
extension = xcache.so
;; or win32:
; extension = php_xcache.dll
[…]
xcache.size = 32M
[…]

That’s it. Restart Apache, and you’re done:

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Afterwards, open phpinfo.php again in a browser: http://192.1681.1.12/phpinfo.php, You should now see XCache mentioned on the page

Integrating XCache Into PHP5