XCache vs APC PHP 5.4.x
Recently I decided to run some upgrades on my servers, and go up to PHP 5.5. I’ve been using APC for a while (convenience) – usually is also bundled with all available repositories, or you can just grab it via PECL. Before that I was always with XCache. But… as long APC is no lonager maintained (last upgrade 2012) I make a call about going to XCache. Run some benchmarks, and here what we got.
Testing hardware:
2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 – 8GB of ram, SSD drives. Website which I was benchmarking was a have WordPress installation with multiple running scripts.
I run ab -n 100 -c 20
Here is what I got:
| apache 1st | apache 2nd | XCache 1st | XCache 2nd | APC 1st | APC 2nd | |
| Time taken for tests [seconds] | 11.11 | 11.11 | 9.029 | 9.073 | 5.474 | 5.343 |
| Complete requests | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Failed requests | 69 | 69 | 69 | 41 | 46 | 40 |
| Requests per second [#/sec] (mean) | 9 | 9 | 11.08 | 11.02 | 18.27 | 18.72 |
| Time per request: [ms] (mean) | 2221.978 | 2221.978 | 1805.76 | 1814.617 | 1094.74 | 1068.568 |
| Transfer rate:[ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) | 111.099 | 111.099 | 90.288 | 90.731 | 54.737 | 53.428 |
| Transfer rate[Kbytes/sec] received | 420.67 | 420.67 | 517.63 | 515.11 | 853.83 | 874.73 |
Surprisingly XCache is much slower then APC – I was expecting better results, but as long we are losing support for APC in PHP 5.5 doesn’t make any sense to keep it runing.