We host Like that Idea and WebCMS Forum through Dakota Hosting on one of their Virtual Dedicated Servers (also known as Virtual Private Servers or VPS). Dakota Hosting’s normal hosting plans have always been optimized for php using Zend Optimizer. However with the virtual as well as dedicated servers you manage the servers yourself and have to install the “extras” yourself. By default the self-managed server does not come with an optimizer for PHP. So today we loaded the free Zend Optimizer. Hopefully, visitors to our site will notice some performance improvements. Although we haven’t had problems before…occasionally our articles get some broader online attention than normal and we like to be ready for those busy periods.
Installing Zend Optimizer was probably the easiest thing we’ve done so far on our server. Put it this way, it was a lot easier to install the optimizer than installing Wordpress or Drupal (both of which are not too difficult to install either). If you have a server you manage yourself, you can get the Zend Optimizer at Zend’s Website. We found a good but dated explanation of how the optimizer works in a publication called New Architect.
We would like to hear from our regular readers if they notice any improvements since we installed the optimizer. We’re always looking at different solutions for tweaking the server! Any additional suggestions for improving performance are also welcomed.
2 comments so far
[...] This looks like a night of upgrades for Like that Idea. Earlier this evening, we upgraded the server with Zend Optimizer. Now we’ve upgraded Wordpress to version 2.0.2 which is mainly a security release though a few other bugs were fixed. During this upgrade we also upgraded the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to version 3.1.? The plugin upgrade adds not only tagging suggestions from Tagyu but also Yahoo. Finally, I renabled the Wordpress chaching, but of course once again I’m not seeing that much difference in performance due to the enabled chaching.? I wish someone could point me to a good reference to how caching works in Wordpress 2.x. Are there any negatives to doing all these changes in one night? Well, yes.? If there is a significant boost or degradation in performance for this site…I won’t know if it was due to the chaching, Wordpress upgrade, Ultimate Tag Warrior upgrade, or the Zend Optimizer! However, I don’t expect problems to develop (last famous words of an over-confident system administrator). [...]
[...] A few days ago I mentioned that we optimized the Virtual Private Server that Like that Idea runs on with Zend Optimizer. We didn’t see many improvements, but I think that I made the mistake in assuming what the optimizer did and didn’t do. From my online readings it appears that the Zend Optimizer works best for those applications encoded on a Zend platform (something we do not have). So I went looking elsewhere and found the open source application, eAccelerator. eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, encoder and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times. [...]
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