I have been having some weird response times from my WordPress installation. I’m running Opensuse 10.0 which comes with PHP 5.0.4.
PHP caches like APC and XCache don’t work with 5.0.4. I can’t just upgrade the distribution since a) this is a VPS and only 10.0 is offered and b) that would be over the top.
First thing I tried was add the software repo at http://software.opensuse.org/download/server:/php/SUSE_Linux_10.0/. I ran yast, checked php5 and poof it installed. Now I was at php 5.2.1. I kept track of the RPM’s and kept the replaced ones in case the bad thing happened.
Both cache apps are built and installed the same way
Extract the tar.gz file
phpize
./configure –some-options
make && make install
And that’s it. Some php5.ini modification and I’m in business.
APC compiled but blew up php in strange ways. Xcache installed and worked well. Even came with an admin page for checking the stats.
WordPress and some of my plugins don’t seem to like 5.2.1 and even with Xcache I was not seeing an improvement. The problem is that the initial response from the web server is 3-10 seconds to get data. I’ve got WP-Cache installed to see if subsequent page loads are faster (they are) but I think the problem is either my VPS or the network.
I rolled php back to 5.0.4 and removed Xcache. Hopefully the problem will sort itself out.
