Cache Monitoring ¶

PHP

OPcache is a PHP extension that improves application performance by storing precompiled script, opcodes, in shared memory. It removes the need to load, parse and compile PHP files on every request.

The opcache.memory_consumption ini setting defines the size of the shared memory storage used by this cache.

Interned strings are a memory optimization added in PHP 5.4. PHP stores immutable strings (a char *) into a special buffer to be able to reuse its pointer for all occurrences of the same string.

Blackfire recommends that the interned strings buffer does not represent more than 85% of the allocated memory.

This setting can be adjusted using the opcache.interned_strings_buffer.

The opcache.max_accelerated_files ini setting configures the maximum number of files that can be cached. Complex applications involve a lot of different PHP files, so it’s recommended to increase the default value of opcache.max_accelerated_files in production.

APCu (APC User Cache) provides a simple API to cache and retrieve data in PHP applications. This data is stored in shared memory segments that can be configured using these settings:

• apc.shm_size configures the size of each shared memory segment;
• apc.shm_segments configures the total number of segments created for APCu.

The realpath() function returns the absolute path for any given relative file path. This conversion takes a non-negligible time because it performs some filesystem calls. That's why PHP caches the results of realpath() calls and their associated stat() calls. The realpath_cache_size ini setting defines the size of this cache.

The PCRE PHP extension maintains a global per-thread cache of compiled regular expressions.