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 PHP accelerator derived from the MMCache extension for the PHP programming language. eAccelerator provides a bytecode cache and encoder. eAccelerator is free and open source.

Every time a PHP script is accessed, PHP usually parses and compiles scripts to bytecode. Once installed, eAccelerator optimizes the compiled bytecode and caches this to shared memory or disk. Upon subsequent accesses to a script, eAccelerator will access cached bytecode if it is available instead of the script being compiled. This avoids the performance overhead of repeated parsing and compilation.

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

The encoder component creates a file that cannot be as easily read as a normal PHP script, offering some code protection. A dedicated extension named eLoader is available to process such encoded scripts if the eAccelerator extension is not desired.