We hope you enjoy reading this blog post
If you need help with website or marketing, book a call with our team for a free 360° overview and actionable recommendations report. Book a call
Speed up Drupal performance with APC (Alternate PHP Cache)
Today I will be talking about APC (Alternate PHP Cache) and how to install it on Ubuntu servers to speed up Drupal. So lets get right to it.
Before we begin I think it’s a good idea to set a performance benchmark to gain a better sense of the effect APC will have on site performance. One way to do this is use the Apache Benchmark (ab) tool (substituting your own website of course):
ab -n 10 -c 10 http://www.somewhere.com/
This will hit the server with 10 requests with a maximum of 5 requests running concurrently. Repeat the test a couple times then average out your results to get a sense of where your performance stands before we install APC. These were my results:
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 1 1.7 0 3
Processing: 2962 5500 2640.3 7789 8089
Waiting: 2679 5277 2719.3 6963 8088
Total: 2965 5502 2638.9 7789 8089
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 7789
66% 8032
75% 8050
80% 8059
90% 8089
95% 8089
98% 8089
99% 8089
100% 8089 (longest request) WOW!!! Not good at all…
Now lets see how APC will help us to improve performance.
Step 1:
First we have to install PECL and the latest PHP-dev packages. You might already have these packages installed, but it doesn’t hurt to run them again to make sure.
sudo aptitude install php-pear
sudo aptitude install php5-dev
sudo aptitude install apache2-dev
Step 2:
*Please note there are some excremental modules that are part of APC. Do not enable them including debugging feature. Simply type [no] for each module.
sudo pecl install apc
Step 3:
To enable in APC all we need to do is edit the php.ini configuration file:
sudo nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
# Add this to the bottom of the file:
extension=apc.so
apc.enabled = 1
apc.shm_size = 48
Once we restart Apache, APC will be enabled with a memory limit of 48MB. This should be enough for most Drupal installs, but if you have a lot of Drupal modules enabled you may want to come back and increase this number later. If there is not enough memory in the APC cache you may end up hurting your performance instead of enhancing it. Restart Apache to finish the installation:
sudo service apache2 restart
And that’s it! APC is now installed and running.
Lets try to run our test again to see how APC is performing:
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 2 2.1 0 4
Processing: 394 411 10.1 412 428
Waiting: 394 404 7.9 404 421
Total: 394 413 11.1 414 432
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 414
66% 416
75% 420
80% 425
90% 432
95% 432
98% 432
99% 432
100% 432 (longest request)
Huge improvement over our initial test. Now our Drupal website is much faster. Enjoy coding…
Like our blog? Subscribe to our newsletter.
Over 4000 marketers love it. Receive information on best marketing practices, exclusive offers, and ways to boost efficiency, quality, and productivity.
