How to install APC in Ubuntu 7.10

Setting up

This guide assumes you already have Apache2 and PHP5 working, and I personally like to use Xdebug to profile and verify improvements I make.

First we're going to open up a terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). If you haven't installed PEAR and php5-dev, you'll have to grab those packages as well.

sudo apt-get install apache2-threaded-dev

Again, if you need to install pear and php5-dev, you can use this instead

sudo apt-get install apache2-threaded-dev php5-dev php-pear

Installing APC

Once that is done installing, we can use pecl and install APC. Before I install APC, I'm going to use Xdebug to benchmark my current setup to see how much of an improvement I can get.

sudo pecl install apc

That will get APC through pecl, and build it. Once it's finished, we can open up our php.ini file

sudo gedit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

And add in the extension...

extension=apc.so

Save your php.ini file, and we're good to go. All we have to do now is restart apache, by using

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Testing

And by checking the output of phpinfo() in a PHP script, we can make sure that it's installed correctly and running.


Now I'll reload my setup again. Without even looking at the benchmarks, I can tell that the load time has improved, especially on the second load, almost instantly. The benchmarks will hopefully confirm my assumption.

Results

With APC installed and enabled, we have cut the time cost in half, and the page loads noticably faster. The numbers say it's about a ~50% improvement in speed. All in all, well worth the time to install.

If you want to learn more about APC, you can check it out on pecl and php.net.

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