I moved my wordpress blog onto the server in my basement. The old server was a dual CPU PIII running at 993 Mhz with a gig of RAM.
The server in the basement is PII 450Mhz box with 256MB ram so it was chugging. I wanted to install the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) for performance reasons but when I ran the command to install it I got back that my version of php was not supported.
openSUSE 10.1 comes with php 5.1.2 so I ran the upgrade via yast (System Update). This had the fun effect of rendering my server un-bootable. The kernel package did not really install so last night I did some quick surgery and got the system booted. This afternoon I installed the DVD drive from my workstation and got the system properly updated.
APC still did not install. Suse and the phpize command (php5-devel package) is apparently broken. Fortunately this webpage has a list of additional repositories. I added LAB-Project since they maintain updated php5 packages including one for APC.
After I added the apc extension to the php5.ini file, the wordpress pages load almost twice as fast before. Mysql was updated to version 5 so that may have also been a factor.
July 16, 2006 at 6:06 pm
additional php modules are now available in the SUSE Build service
including pecl modules zip,xdebug,runkit,imagick,filter,json..
http://software.opensuse.org/download/server:/php/
we don’t build apc ATM but xcache [1] that is more stable under PHP5.
[1] http://trac.lighttpd.net/xcache/
July 16, 2006 at 9:51 pm
Much thanks, I’ll check out xcache and those rpms.
So far APC has worked well for me but anything to speed up my old server will be welcomed.