Bart’s Soapbox – A Geeklog server on FreeBSD:
To get more performance out of PHP, there are a few ways to go.
Install pear and pear-APC
Install Turck-mmcache
Install a Zend cache
I get by far the best results by installing the somewhat experimental Turck-mmcache package instead of the commercial Zend-cache, and it seems to do its job very well.
Pear and APC caused some trouble for Apache and it wouldn’t shutdown properly, instead going in an infinite loop somewhere.
To install it on FreeBSD:
cd /usr/ports/www/turck-mmcache
make install
And follow the instructions at the end of the installation to update your php.ini file.
This seems to a quick and easy fix: this machine got swamped by a comment spam attack last night and even with 128 Mb of RAM dedicated to php, it still had issues. While I shop for more RAM, this seems to speed things up a bit.