APC optimizer in use

[Steve]

For those geeky enough to care, I've enabled the APC PHP optimizer on the forums. This should make the site feel a lot faster when browsing.

[silver]

for those of us who aren't geeky enough to understand what you just said do you want to dumb it down, WAY down?

[Norm]

The Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a free and open opcode cache for PHP. It was conceived of to provide a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code.















Yeah, Google didn't really help! Just geek speak ...

[Steve]

Hehehe. Sometimes people refer to it as a PHP accelerator. Basically, for sites running PHP (which is a popular scripting language that runs many sites, including this one), it caches information that is re-used often and displays it quickly to a visitor, rather than looking the information up again.

From http://www.theukwebdesigncompany.com...p-caching.php:

This entire site, like many, is built in PHP. PHP provides the power to simply 'pull' content from an external source, in the case of my site this is flat files but it could just as easily be an MySQL database or an XML file etc..

The downside to this is processing time, each request for one page can trigger multiple database queries, processing of the output, and formatting it for display... This can be quite slow on complex sites (or slower servers)

Ironically, these so-called 'dynamic' sites probably have very little changing content, this page will almost never be updated after the day it is written - yet each time someone requests it the scripts goes and fetches the content, applies various functions and filters to it, then outputs it to you...

Enter Caching

This is where caching can help us out, instead of regenerating the page every time, the scripts running this site generate it the first time they're asked to, then store a copy of what they send back to your browser. The next time a visitor requests the same page, the script will know it'd already generated one recently, and simply send that to the browser without all the hassle of re-running database queries or searches.