The Tideways.io site has posted a tutorial showing you how to "avoid the thundering herd" of incoming requests to your application using a file-based PHP 7 opcode cache to reduce load and increase performance on your site.

In the last blog post about Fine-Tuning Opcache Configuration I mentioned the thundering herd problem that affects Opcache during cache restarts. When Opcache is restarted, either automatically or manually, all current users will attempt to regenerate the cache entries. Under load this can lead to a burst in CPU usage and significantly slower requests.

[...] In Rasmus talk at FrOsCon 2015 (Video at 12:30, Slides), he showed the persistent secondary file-based cache Opcache gets in PHP 7. It can read the generated opcodes from disk instead of having to recompile the code after cache restart. This happens only when the compiled opcaches are not found in shared memory.

They talk about the benefits that this caching can provide, not only to web-based applications but also to command line scripts. There's a mention of possible security issues if an attacker is able to read/write to the cache files (but permissions can help that). The post ends with how to install it on your own PHP 7 instance, using the --enable-opcache-file flag on compilation.