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"WOW! I must say that PHP Accelerator is one of the best pieces of software that I have used in a long long time. ... Simply Amazing!" - Sumbry
Faster PHP in an Instant
The ionCube PHP Accelerator is an easily installed
PHP Zend engine extension that
provides a PHP cache, and is capable of delivering a substantial acceleration of
PHP scripts without requiring any script changes, loss of dynamic content, or
other application compromises.
Unlike scripting languages such as Microsoft ASP1, compilation of any unchanged scripts is entirely eliminated when PHPA is installed, and so
a typical PHP request incurs no compilation overhead at all.
PHPA is free, and not only the top performing non-commercial solution of its kind, but also a
match for the commercial alternatives. Delivering typically up to a 5 times speed gain and with
a near 10 times speed-up measured with some Smarty
based applications, sites such as
Yahoo! have found PHPA to be the ideal
PHP script caching solution. The testimonials
give some user reactions to PHPA.
The PHPA project is now well established, and remains ongoing and
active in its aim to offer the PHP user community with not only the most
desirable and effective acceleration technology, but also thorough,
Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate, timely and
detailed support. (Read some support testimonials)
Latest News
Support for PHP 4.4 on Linux (Jul 20-05)
PHPA is now available for PHP 4.4 on x86 Linux. Going forward, PHPA may be replaced by a new accelerator product in the coming months.
Version 1.3.3r2 builds for Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux and PHP 4.3.0 (Jan 14-03)
Linux,
Windows 7 Enterprise Key, FreeBSD and Solaris all brought up to 1.3.3r2 and available for the
official PHP 4.3.0 release.
Version 1.3.3 Released for Solaris 2.8 (16 Oct)
Solaris builds are now available.
Version 1.3.3 Released (28 Sep)
Version 1.3.3 is now released for most supported platforms and incorporates minor fixes and modifications to the 1.3.2 releases.
Online Forum Now Available (30 Aug)
The folks at phorum.org have setup an online PHPA forum for PHPA users to discuss PHPA related issues. A section is also available
for hosting providers offering PHPA in their hosting plans to freely
advertise themselves.
Linux Format Magazine distribute PHPA on CD (22 Aug)
Linux Format magazine
are now distributing PHPA 1.3.1 on their CD in the UK (although this is
without seeking prior approval). As this is not the latest release, please
be sure to pick up the latest version if you have previously obtained
PHPA from their CD.
PHPA Version 1.3.2 Revision 2 Released (8 Aug)
This revision to release 1.3.2 makes setting up PHPA easier, removing a step
that has been required in all earlier releases (many thanks to Yahoo! for
providing this change), and now ships a tuned version
of the Accelerator that can deilver higher performance than regular
libraries on some platforms. The standard library is provided as well.
The main change in the release 1.3.2 family is the removal of activation keys, and
there are a few enhancements and minor bug fixes.
The ionCube PHP Encoder goes Live! (22 July)
The ionCube PHP Encoder has finally hit the web, and offers the first truly cost effective PHP encoding solution
for code protection and data hiding. Through the convenience of a unique
online portal, the service offers the
best combination of simplicity, price and algorithm protection of any PHP
Encoding product available in the marketplace today. Key features
are compiled
code encoding rather than the more common source code hiding,
a decoder extension for full support of normal and PHP safe mode execution,
fast encoded files (faster than raw source in early benchmarks), full PHP
compatability, and compatibility with the next release of PHPA.
The next PHPA, version 1.3.2, is planned to be released this week,
and along with minor updates, is designed to provide secure interoperability
with the encoded file decoder by not caching encoded files; it would be a security risk to do so. Version 1.4 of PHPA is likely to support secure caching of
encoded files if this was chosen at encoding time.
Activation keys to be removed! (21 June)
Since its introduction, the PHPA activation key has been a controversial
feature, but a vital part of the
continuing process of product improvement for PHPA. Not only has it been a
useful measure of interest in PHPA, it's been integral to the process of
obtaining feedback, and having people's experiences be used as part of a continuous improvement process.
However as PHPA has matured, they have served their purpose and all
releases from 1.3.2 onwards will be 'activation key free'.
PHPA to support Encoded PHP Files (18 June)
There's a new and interesting PHP Encoder project on the horizon, and version 1.4 of PHP Accelerator will be including support for accelerating the encoded files of this new encoder. There
are a number of encoders on the market, offering different degrees of protection and features, and varying vastly in price. This encoding solution
is rather different from
them all, and by offering online encoding,
is possibly the future for people looking for an affordable but secure
encoding solution.
To capture the relationship of both PHPA and
PHPE, ionCube has been specially created to carry
both these and other products into the future.
Yahoo! go with PHPA (13 June)
Yahoo,
Office 2010 Activation!
have been testing PHPA for some months whilst exploring PHP caching
solutions, and have
selected PHPA
as a caching solution for PHP projects.
Build for Tru64 Unix Available (7 June)
A build of PHPA Version 1.3.1pre3 for Tru64 Unix is now available, and
works on OS version 4.0G, 5.0, 5.1.
PHPA, APC,
Windows 7 Key, AfterBurner Comparisons (28 May)
A recent article entitled Study and Optimisation of a Web Server presents
the results of performance comparisons between PHPA and other popular caching
systems, and concludes that PHPA outperforms the others by a wide margin.
More performance information is presented
on the performance page.
Builds for PHPA 1.3.1 released for i386 OpenBSD 3.0 (20 May)
Builds for i386 OpenBSD 3.0 are now available for PHP 4.1.2 and PHP 4.2.1.
PHPA 1.3.1 available for Linux and Solaris 2.8 (16 May)
Pre-release builds of version 1.3.1 are now available for Linux. Version 1.3.1 squeezes a little more performance out of the PHP engine than version 1.2p4, and performs better than 1.3.0.
Paper on PHPA Internals (11 May)
A request was recently made by www.php-ev.de
for a short paper describing PHPA, and to be featured in a forthcoming journal of theirs.
The paper presents an insight into the architecture and code optimiser of PHPA 1.2, and is available now in word and
pdf formats.
Version 1.3.0 Released for Linux and FreeBSD 4.5 (6 May)
Version 1.3.0 is now released for Linux and FreeBSD 4.5. This release incorporates many changes
over the 1.2 releases. There are minor changes, as well as some internal
enhancements and redesign to the shared memory cache. Full details are available in the release notes.
Recent News
Builds for 1.2p4 released for PHP 4.2.0 on Linux (22 Apr)
Builds of PHPA 1.2p4 are now available for PHP 4.2.0 on Linux. Builds for other
platforms for PHP 4.2.0 will be available when PHPA 1.3 is complete.
Builds for 1.2p4 released for Solaris, FreeBSD 4.4 and OpenBSD 3.0 (24 Mar)
Version 1.2p4 Released (23 Mar)
Version 1.2p4 is released for Linux and FreeBSD 4.5. Builds for other
supported platforms will be added soon.
This offers significantly enhanced support and resiliency
for sites that experience occasional server crashes,
adds some new features including better support for setting multiple
activation keys,
fixes a bug that could cause problems for very heavily loaded sites
as well as some other minor fixes.
New Releases (3 Mar)
The first downloads for i386 Solaris are now available, as well as new
FreeBSD and OpenBSD releases.
Version 1.2p3 released for Linux, FreeBSD 4.5,
Office Professional Plus 2010, Sparc Solaris 2.8, BSDi 4.2 and OpenBSD 3.0 (2627 Feb)
Release 1.2p3 fixes a bug that may cause incorrect operation on very heavily loaded sites.
Smarty Template Benchmarks (15 Feb)
Benchmarks of the Smarty
templates system with and without acceleration using PHPA show that nearly
10 times acceleration from PHPA is possible on Smarty based applications.
PHPACA Web Front End Released (3 Feb)
Hannes Edinger has written a GUI
front end to the phpa_cache_admin tool that's bundled with every release. You can obtain this and try it out at the PHPACA site
.
Version 1.2 released for FreeBSD 4.3 (30 Jan)
A port of version 1.2 is now available for FreeBSD 4.3.
Builds for version 1.2p3 on several FreeBSD platforms will be available soon.
1Microsoft have introduced a concept of
"Dynamic Compilation" that claims
to improve the performance of ASP within the .NET framework, although not
for regular ASP 3.0. However one should note that this statement still contains the word compilation. PHP with PHPA has quite simply
no compilation for unchanged scripts, and may well be the preferable technology and choice.