This is a list of PHP accelerators.
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Alternative PHP Cache is a free, open source (PHP license) framework that optimizes PHP intermediate code and caches data and compiled code from the PHP bytecode compiler in shared memory. APC is quickly becoming the de-facto standard PHP caching mechanism as it will be included built-in to the core of PHP starting with PHP 5.4. [1]
eAccelerator was born in December 2004 as a fork of the Turck MMCache project. Turck MMCache was created by Dmitry Stogov and much of the eAccelerator code is still based on his work. eAccelerator also contained a PHP encoder and loader, but the development staff discontinued the encoder and removed this feature after December 2006.
Launched in 2001, ionCube PHP Accelerator (PHPA) was the first freely available PHP accelerator to compete with the commercial Zend Cache product. Created before ionCube Ltd. was founded and at a time when the performance of PHP was regarded as lackluster when compared to other popular web programming languages, PHPA showed that PHP can compete with other languages performance-wise. Although the author of PHPA chose to keep the project closed source in response to early concerns raised by Zeev Suraski of Zend Technologies about the effect that an open source rival might have on their commercial alternative, the availability of PHPA on a wide variety of platforms led to its extensive adoption worldwide from small sites to Yahoo!. It also inspired the redevelopment of APC to use the shared memory execution techniques that PHPA and Zend Cache had adopted instead of deserialization on each request that incurred performance penalties.
PHPA is now discontinued and the development of a more advanced replacement has been announced.
Only supports PHP 4. No new versions on the download page since Jan. 2003.
Turck MMCache is now discontinued. eAccelerator is a fork of Turck MMCache.
XCache is a fast, stable PHP opcode cacher that has been tested and is now running on production servers under high load. It is tested on Linux and FreeBSD and supported under Windows, for thread-safe and non-thread-safe versions of PHP. This relatively new opcode caching software has been developed by mOo, one of developers of Lighttpd, to overcome some of the limitations of the existing solutions at that time; such as being able to use it with new PHP versions as they arrive.
PhpExpress is a free PHP opcode cache that loads both Nu-Coder (commercial) encoded and plain PHP files directly into the PHP engine, saving loading time and boosting performance of PHP applications. It's available on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.
Zend Optimizer+ [2] is a component of Zend Server and Zend Server Community Edition. Zend Optimizer+ speeds up PHP execution by opcode caching and optimization. It stores precompiled script bytecode in shared memory. This eliminates the stages of reading code from the disk and compiling it on future access. For further performance improvements, the stored bytecode is optimized for faster execution. Unlike Zend Optimizer, Zend Optimizer+ doesn't load files encoded by Zend Guard. Zend provides another component, Zend Guard Loader, in order to load encoded applications with Zend Server and Zend Server Community Edition.
Zend Platform (formerly Zend Cache and then Zend Accelerator) is a commercial Web Application Server product. It has a complete set of performance capabilities that includes more than a simple PHP accelerator. Features include code caching/acceleration, data caching, content (html output) caching, download optimization and off-line (asynchronous) processing capabilities that can result in significant performance improvements for most PHP applications. It also includes detailed PHP monitoring and root cause analysis support to help in tuning and debugging, session fail-over support for HA (High Availability) needs and other integration capabilities including Java integration.
Zend Platform and Zend Core are now in 'end of life' status (http://www.zend.com/en/products/platform/end-of-life) and are replaced with Zend Server [1].
Despite the name, Zend Optimizer is not a code accelerator. Rather, is a free, closed source PHP extension by Zend Technologies that enables PHP 5.2 or earlier to run files encoded or obfuscated by Zend Guard.[3] Zend Optimizer 3.0 or greater allows to deobfuscate files and, Zend Optimizer 3.3 or greater allows to decode files.[4] Zend Guard Loader is similar to Zend Optimizer but works with PHP 5.3.[3] The website for these pieces of software encourages people interested on this tools to download Zend Server. It is possible to download them separately, though.[3]
A free, open source (New BSD License), PHP accelerator developed by Microsoft for PHP under Windows. The extension includes PHP opcode cache, file cache, resolve file path cache, object/session cache, file change notifications and lock/unlock API's. Combination of all these caches results in significant performance improvements for PHP applications hosted on Windows. The extension is primarily used with Internet Information Services and non-thread-safe build of PHP via FastCGI protocol.