In a new post to the Bollysite Blog there's a look at how to get better performance out of your Lighttpd web server with xcache.

A typical PHP application and most of the frameworks uses "The Loop" method to code the website. Whenever request comes to website, It's typically sent to index page to handle every parameters. [...] We can use xcache variables to store entire web page and serve it from RAM.

They include some basic benchmarks showing the impact that caching an have on a site as well as code that you can use to integrate their xcache library into your site. The library uses the XCache functionality to store the rendered output of the page for a default of three hours time.

In this quick tutorial on the Bollysite blog showing how to upgrade your CentOS install of PHP from 5.1 to 5.3 along with xcache.

CentOS 5 comes with php 5.1 version. There is no official PHP 5.2+ release for upgrade since last 3 years. [...] As a result, Developer had to implement alternative functions to integrate twitter, myspace OAuth API. Today wordpress has officially said bye bye to php 4 and mysql 4. So finally, I gathered some courage to mess with my current php installation. I followed the following steps to upgrade php 5.3 on centos 5.

The update requires adding the webtatic repository to your yum setup and using the "enablerepo" to pull directly from that. Once that's installed, you'll need to rebuild xcache to match the version (commands included).

Abhinav Singh has a new post to his blog today showing how to get Nginx, PHP (FastCGI) and XCache all up and running on an Ubuntu installation. He made the switch to this platform after he made the change in his choice of web servers:

Recently, because of a mandatory VPS move I had an opportunity to migrate all my sites from apache to nginx. My old box was in a messy state and setting up a new box from scratch was always going to be fun. Here in this post, I will walk you through all the steps that helped me migrate seamlessly. Specially, how did I setup the new box ensuring zero downtime on the sites.

One of the keys to his transition was to have no downtime in the switch between the old and new systems (managing local vs public DNS let him test). The software is all installed via the apt-get package manager and the changes you'll need to make to the configuration files are all included, making the install as easy on you as possible.

Mike Willbanks has made a series of posts covering the acceleration tools available for you the PHP developer and some of the benchmarks of using them in an application.

Here's the list:

• PHP Accelerators : APC vs Zend vs XCache with Zend Framework - a comparison of three tools - APC, the Zend Framework components and the XCache tool
• Zend Framework Performance Zend_Loader - a specific look at benchmarks on the Zend_Loader component
• PHP Accelerators: The Missing Details - benchmark results (and code) showing results from testing on the Zend_Loader component
• Accelerators Revisited - a revisit to some of the benchmarks made previously (to change things based on user contributed comments)

Mike Willbanks has made a series of posts covering the acceleration tools available for you the PHP developer and some of the benchmarks of using them in an application.

Here's the list:

• PHP Accelerators : APC vs Zend vs XCache with Zend Framework - a comparison of three tools - APC, the Zend Framework components and the XCache tool
• Zend Framework Performance Zend_Loader - a specific look at benchmarks on the Zend_Loader component
• PHP Accelerators: The Missing Details - benchmark results (and code) showing results from testing on the Zend_Loader component
• Accelerators Revisited - a revisit to some of the benchmarks made previously (to change things based on user contributed comments)

The IBM developerWorks website has posted the first part of a series looking at boosting the performance and throughput of your PHP applications through an opcode caching software, specifically XCache.

PHP is a scripting language most often used to create Web applications. It's easy to learn and produces visible results quickly. However, because PHP is interpreted, PHP code is parsed and translated to opcodes every time it executes. An opcode cache eliminates that rework, making PHP applications faster.

They start with the installation of the software (just XCache, they assume everything else is installed) and what to edit in the php.ini file to get things up and running. They follow this up with a sample benchmark for a local phpmyadmin installation.

The IBM developerWorks website has posted the first part of a series looking at boosting the performance and throughput of your PHP applications through an opcode caching software, specifically XCache.

PHP is a scripting language most often used to create Web applications. It's easy to learn and produces visible results quickly. However, because PHP is interpreted, PHP code is parsed and translated to opcodes every time it executes. An opcode cache eliminates that rework, making PHP applications faster.

They start with the installation of the software (just XCache, they assume everything else is installed) and what to edit in the php.ini file to get things up and running. They follow this up with a sample benchmark for a local phpmyadmin installation.

Since the recent release of a new tool from Yahoo! - Yahoo! Pipes - developers have been working with it and creating their own "pipes" of functionality, already exploring the boundaries of the application. Clay Loveless is one PHP developer that has already created his own pipe to monitor feeds from several PHP extensions.

The first pipe I've created and published is the PHP Extension Monitor. It's an aggregated feed that pulls in release information on several cool extensions that aren’t announced in the PECL feed, such as Suhosin, XCache and DBXML.

Check out his pipe here or you can go create your own by logging in with a Yahoo! ID here.

Since the recent release of a new tool from Yahoo! - Yahoo! Pipes - developers have been working with it and creating their own "pipes" of functionality, already exploring the boundaries of the application. Clay Loveless is one PHP developer that has already created his own pipe to monitor feeds from several PHP extensions.

The first pipe I've created and published is the PHP Extension Monitor. It's an aggregated feed that pulls in release information on several cool extensions that aren’t announced in the PECL feed, such as Suhosin, XCache and DBXML.

Check out his pipe here or you can go create your own by logging in with a Yahoo! ID here.