Comments on: APC vs Zend vs MMCache vs Ioncube

By: stefan

stefan — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 17:12:34 +0000

Till do you have any of your php files encoded? I think it is caused by the encoded processes. Basically what happens is you will start to see a lot of segfaults going through your logs on a random script, then eventually apache stops responding. There is a bug report about it that has never been solved. Have talked to all the people with the same issues and they told me they had the same problems, nothing changed… Here is the link to the bug:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1091402&group_id=122249&atid=692864

It has been open since 2004 still no fix. Also you will probably find a bunch of segfault bugs in there as well… You are pretty lucky not to have this problem. We face having to restart our webservers weekly/bi-weekly depending on when apache locks up.

If you don’t need encoding ability I would highly suggest that you use APC instead, it is pretty stable with a really good development team (hey when you have Rasmus Lerdorf as one of the developers you know you are in good hands). Anyway those are just my 2 cents. If eaccellerator is working error free for you, then you have nothing to worry about, why change something that is working well.

By: till

till — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 10:12:11 +0000

Can you elaborate a little on eAccelerator? I’ve been running eAccelerator in production for several months, and with production I mean that those are websites that handle 200+ GB of web traffic monthly. I did not encounter any Apache deadlocks.

By: stefan

stefan — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 04:08:11 +0000

I think the reason Ioncube claims to be better is that some of these encoders such as mmcache/eaccelerator and source guardian just encode to a form of bytecode, such it can be translated back to PHP code. The Zend encoder however I think is pretty strong as well. You are right though, there are two questions at play here, how much you value the security of your scripts, and how much you the value the speed at which they run. Personally I would love to see an encoder for APC, that would ideal.

By: jesus

jesus — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 22:37:23 +0000

hello. great information.

one more question about
protecting source-code:

IONcube claims that their propietary technology is likely unbreakable and better than the others.

is this right ?

i couldnt find what what weaknesses of
the competitors…
may be you know what
they are pointing to.

we have two different
king of web-applications:

- those ones that requires security instead of speed

- and those ones that
required acceleration
dispate of sacrificing some security.

thanks in advance
and very usefull information,
jesus