OpenX Blog

Using a PHP accelerator can greatly improve the performance of your PHP applications and the OpenX ad server is no exception. Installing a PHP accelerator is likely to improve OpenX performance more than any other single tuning technique.

We recently heard from Xuk, an OpenX publisher, who serves around 210 million impressions a month. Xuk’s ad server was showing signs of heavy load. As a result he decided to try installing an open source PHP accelerator and was kind enough to post some performance benchmarks of his ad server before and after installing a PHP accelerator.

As you can see from Xuk results, adding the PHP accelerator made a big difference. Requests per second are up from 28 per second to 88 per second whilst the system load is down 3.6 to 2.0. In our experience, Xuk’s results are pretty typical. We recommend OpenX publishers use a PHP accelerator to ensure they are getting the most out their existing hardware.

Thanks Xuk, this is a good reminder for OpenX publishers everywhere.

What’s your experience?
Have you experimented with using a PHP accelerator? Did you see similar results? Which PHP accelerator would you recommend and what performance gains would you expect?

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Related links:

• PHP Cache website
• eAccelerator website
• Key Performance Tuning Techniques for OpenX