The Zend Developer Zone has published a new in-depth tutorial from Vikram Vaswani about using APC and PHP to get the best performance out of your application. Using this opcode caching tool can greatly speed up the execution of your site with almost no effort on your part.

dding APC to an application usually results in improved application response times, reduced server load and happier users. In this article, I'll introduce you to APC, guiding you through the process of installing and configuring it and showing you a few examples of how it works. I'll also walk you through the APC administrator interface, which lets you view APC performance in real time, and show you how you can use it with the Zend Framework

He shows you every step of the way - installation, configuration (complete with some screenshots) and the web-based interface you can enable to see the statistics about how the cache's performance is and what requests it's been handling. He mentions other abilities APC has like array and object caching, caching closures and finally a real-world example of using it to cache the results of a Twitter search request (in a Zend Framework environment).