Description:
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Hello.

I very apreciate the work you guys have done to get APC working for PHP, it's the best opcode cacher available out there, keep up going this high!

I'm developing large, high-performance websites written in PHP on WAMP, supported by APC. A couple of weeks ago i started to improve my code by optimizing it, and also, getting all the best out of PHP + APC performance. The main discovery that i made while i was trying to get over a 3 millisecond middle-sized page generation on 2.15GHZ Core2DUO processor is that the bottleneck is a hard disk! What does APC? with apc.stat =0 completely eliminates all php's accesses to hard disk drive by caching php scripts into RAM. This improves performance fantastically, even if i had only 10 files to include in my web page with apc.stat =1. I mean, 10 accesses to hdd cost to me about 10 milliseconds of execution time. After the fact i have faced, i started to worry about every include i got in my scripts, and, every potential hdd access due web page request processing. I downloaded Process Monitor, the program that is able to monitor filesystem activities of specific processes. What i saw on php is that due to every request to web page with apc installed, apc does lots of locking and unlocking of lock files in windows temporary directory. I have downloaded the lastest source code (version 3.0.15) and actually found that APC is using a filesystem for synchronizing itself! And i have a question about that. Why is APC using filesystem for synchronization? Isn't it possible to build into APC a semaphore, lock, spin lock or something, that will operate in memory of current process? This one can make APC A LOT FASTER. If implementation of "non-filesystem" locks in APC is possible, i would be very glad if you make this come true. The key to performance is to remove all access to hard disk.