I like stats. We all like stats in some form or other. It brings order to often disorganised information.
My website has been taking a lot of hits recently, far over the normal amount of traffic I get. To the left should show that quite clearly.

All of those extra hits have been for one particular post I made. Hampshire police bus. As you can see to the right, I’ve had close to 10,000 hits just for that post.

Apc has been taking a lot of weight off the shoulders of my server (1.24 million hits!). Admittedly, my server doesn’t just host my website, but several other popular websites too. The user cache variables are from my websites only though.

I’m pretty thankful I run APC, mod_deflate and WP Super Cache. Without any of these my server would probably be struggling. I’d also recommend the WordPress APC object cache for those who use WordPress and have APC installed.

I’ve lost count how many times I’ve needed to recompile a new version of APC for PHP on my server, so this mainly serves as a reminder on how to do it for next time.

1. Go to http://pecl.php.net/package/APC and find the latest download link at the time.
2. Login via SSH and go into root login via

   su -

3. Navigate to the source folder:

   cd /usr/local/src

4. wget the latest download from the PHP pecl link above. (i.e. wget http://pecl.php.net/get/APC-3.0.15.tgz)
5. Unzip the archive like so:

   gunzip -c APC-3.0.15.tgz | tar xf -

6. Navigate to the APC folder:

   cd APC-3.0.15

7. phpize the APC folder to make the correct configuration file: /usr/bin/phpize
8. Make the configuration file:

   ./configure --enable-apc --enable-apc-mmap --with-apxs --with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config

9. Start the compile:

   make

10. Finish and install:

    make install

11. Edit the php.ini file to enable the APC module based on the location provided from the previous command:

    pico -w /usr/lib/php.ini

12. Finally restart apache to see the changes:

    service httpd restart

The important bits you need to put inside php.ini are the extension call like so:

extension = "apc.so"

You then also need to enable and configure APC to your liking. Here’s my setup:

apc.enabled = 1
apc.shm_size = 64
apc.ttl = 3600
apc.user_ttl = 3600
apc.optimization = 0
apc.filters = "-Gallery.*\.class, wp-cache-config, -mint.php"
apc.include_once_override=1
apc.write_lock=1

Other things you need to take into account is your PHP extension_dir setting. This needs to be set right to be able to load the module correctly above.
You should also bear in mind that /usr/bin/phpize and /usr/bin/php-config could be different for your system setup.