EAccelerator

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The correct title of this article is eAccelerator. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

Not to be confused with the computer security company eAcceleration.

eAccelerator is a fork of MMCache (was TurckMMCache). Both are extensions for PHP which provide an opcode cache and encoder. eAccelerator is free and open source.

After PHP compiles a script into a list of opcodes, eAccelerator optimizes those opcodes, and then caches the compiled list to shared memory or disk. Upon subsequent accesses to the script, this optimized and precompiled list is loaded, to avoid the compilation penalty.

eAccelerator also provides certain functions[1] for use in PHP scripts which allow access to shared memory, automatic web (content) caching, and other related tasks.

The encoder is very similar to the proprietary Zend Encoder software, which also creates a file that cannot be as easily read as a normal PHP script. An extension named eLoader is also available to execute such encoded scripts if the eAccelerator extension is not desired.