On a Unix machine with PECL installed you can get APC by running the command
sudo pecl install apc
Once the automated setup is done you must complete the installation by editing the php.ini file. The minimal required settings are as follows:
extension=apc.so apc.stat=1 apc.enabled=1
The last line takes value 1 or 0 to enable or disable the opcode caching.
Optionally, if you want to configure more, settings are as follows:
[APC] extension = apc.so apc.enabled = 1 apc.shm_segments = 1 apc.shm_size = 128 apc.optimization = 0 apc.num_files_hint = 1024 apc.user_entries_hint = 1024 apc.ttl = 0 apc.user_ttl = 0 apc.gc_ttl = 600 apc.cache_by_default = 1 apc.filters = "apc\.php$" apc.slam_defense = 0 apc.use_request_time = 1 apc.mmap_file_mask = /tmp/apc-yourusernamehere.XXXXXX OR /dev/zero apc.file_update_protection = 2 apc.enable_cli = 0 apc.max_file_size = 5M apc.stat = 1 apc.write_lock = 1 apc.report_autofilter = 0 apc.include_once_override = 0 apc.rfc1867 = 0 apc.rfc1867_prefix = "upload_" apc.rfc1867_name = "APC_UPLOAD_PROGRESS" apc.rfc1867_freq = 0 apc.localcache = 1 apc.localcache.size = 512 apc.coredump_unmap = 0 apc.stat_ctime = 0
While APC is enabled, now to test a product page, type in terminal:
sudo ab -n 1000 -c 5 http://local.test.com/sony-vaio-vgn-txn27n-b-11-1-notebook-pc.html
To visualize the APC caching impact on a Magento store let’s use the APC management tool that becomes available once the APC is installed. A file called apc.php can be found under /usr/share/php/apc.php. Copy this file into web server root directory so that it can be called by its URL in a browser i.e.
http://local.test.com/apc.php
And the output will be as below:
