Installing PHP APC on GNU/Linux Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 (and Debian)

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Published Mon, 2008/03/24 - 13:49

Complex PHP applications, such as Drupal, can gain a lot of performance benefits from running a PHP op-code cache/accelerators.

APC, Alternate PHP Cache, is now the most maintained free/open source op-code cache, and is being used more and more as it emerges to be the most stable.

The instructions here detail how to get APC running on an Ubuntu server running Gutsy Gibbon 7.10.

First, we need the pecl command so we can download and install APC from the repositories.

Do to so, we execute the following command:

aptitude install php-pear

But, this will not run on its own, we need the following package for the phpize command:

aptitude install php5-dev

We also need the apxs command, which is installed via the following package:

aptitude install apache2-dev

Now we have all the software we need, so we install apc via the pecl command:

pecl install apc

Once that finishes, we need to enable apc in Apache's configuration. the following command should do this for us.

echo "extension=apc.so" > /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/apc.ini

Then we restart Apache:

 /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And we are all done. Watch for less execution time per page, and decreased memory usage per Apache process compared to what you had before.

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APC and ZendOptimizer

Submitted by Salvador (not verified) on Mon, 2010/03/08 - 19:40.

Few months ago I have installed Zend Optimizer in my Drupal site.
To improve performance I have installed APC and my site is crashing.
Is there a problem with Zend Optimizer and APC? How can I uninstall APC?
Most of my users are unregistered. Would I use Zend or APC?

Removing APC

Submitted by Khalid on Mon, 2010/03/08 - 20:08.

Did you install APC using pecl? If so then issue this from the command line:

pecl uninstall APC

Otherwise, just prevent APC from getting loaded. Find in your php.ini the place that has apc.so, and add a semicolon (;) before that line. That will have the same effect.

apt-get

Submitted by Tristen (not verified) on Sun, 2010/01/17 - 01:20.

I had problems getting this to work on PHP 5.2.12-0.dotdeb.1 This link explains the .dotdeb version does not override the default php-config to php-config5 necessary for phpize.

I tried this:
Running pecl install apc --with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config5

But it gave me this error:
Attempting to discover channel "--with-php-config=/usr/bin"... Attempting fallback to https instead of http on channel "--with-php-config=/usr/bin"... unknown channel "--with-php-config=/usr/bin" in "--with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config5" invalid package name/package file "--with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config5"

Finally I just ran this:
apt-get install php-apc

Everything seems fine!

Depends on version and repository

Submitted by Khalid on Sun, 2010/01/17 - 11:09.

I always advocate using the long term support (LTS) server version (8.04 at present), and only the official repositories. This makes things easier and more contained. For 8.04 LTS, there is no pre-built APC package in the official repositories.

Ubuntu 9.10 has a php-apc package, but it is not a long term support version, and hence not suitable for live servers.

this worked :) and on the

Submitted by Visitor (not verified) on Mon, 2009/07/06 - 14:53.

this worked :) and on the latest version of ubuntu...

Thanks!

Hi, thank you for the

Submitted by Syamsul (not verified) on Sun, 2009/06/21 - 08:55.

Hi, thank you for the tutorial. I was unable to complete the pecl command and encountered this error message:

Sorry, I was not able to successfully run APXS. Possible reasons:

1. Perl is not installed;
2. Apache was not compiled with DSO support (--enable-module=so);
3. 'apxs' is not in your path. Try to use --with-apxs=/path/to/apxs

however, this was resolved with