Does APC really improve performance with PHP 5.3+

Solution 1:

The purpose of APC is to provide:

• opcode cache (in a nutshell - saving compiled PHP code to memory for reuse/performance)
• data store (providing API for PHP code to persistently store and retrieve data to/from memory)

PHP 5.3 release, while being important release in general, has no such functionality natively.

Upcoming PHP 5.5 is planned to integrate Zend Optimizer for opcode cache (but no data store).

There might be configuration, security, resource consumption and other considerations to advise against APC in specific cases.

However implying that PHP 5.3 somehow has replacement functionality and has no need for opcode caching (APC or other) is blatantly incorrect.

So the very first thing you should do, if you haven't already, is to install opcode cache.

Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP)

Digg Technical Talks - PHP Performance 00:17:21