Hi,

After we tested for aproxx 1 month the phpexpress accelerator in our preproduction environment we decided that it's performance is acceptable and we implemented in our production environment (by the way, only this php accelerator worked with our php application). However, we have a weird problem with this php accelerator, but before to explain our problem here are some information about our production environment:
- dedicated https load balancer (appliance)
- http backend servers ( x86 gentoo linux distribution) with apache 2.2.14, php 5.2.11, kernel 2.6.28, glibc 2.9, phpexpress 2.0.3 (build 2036)
- all backend server have access to the php source code (php files) through NFS (meaning that all backend servers have the documentroot as a mounted NFS volume)
- we are using a lot the smarty template engine
- the number of php files of our application (without the template files generated through smarty) is aproxx 2000

The problem:
- before of using the phpexpress we had on the average aproxx 10-11MB per second NFS traffic on each backend server
- after we implemented the phpexpress the NFS traffic has drop to aprox 700KB per second on each backend server
- however, after 6-12 days of enabled phpexpress we encounter a growth to aproxx 6-8 MB per second NFS traffic and a low performance of the php on each backend server (each backend serve aproxx 35 thousand of unique visitors per day)
- here is a output of phpexpress() function:

- from the total of 2837 file from cache aproxx 2200 are smarty templates
- the most used files have 5397914 hits
If we use the clear cache function of phpexpress the apache will freeze (if we don't restart the apache it will freeze anyway after another 2-3 days without doing us a clear cache)
On a few of our backend we had disabled the phpexpress and the above problems has disappeared but the NFS traffic has gone again to aprox 10-11 MBs.

Are you guys able to give me some advices on this problem ? Or is there any phpexpress version with more than 8MB of cache we can use ? Or is there any beta/alpha phpexpress pro version we can use in out testing environment and see if the problem persist ?

We would appreciate any help on this problem.

Thank you,
--
cosmih

Hi cosmih,

This forum is mostly for people to share their experience. If you have something uncommon that nobody faced with, they won't help.
Please contact our support http://www.nusphere.com/contact_us and provide the details:
-how often is your httpd reloaded (SIG_HUPed)
-did you configure apache to dump core (in case of crash) into a writable directory? If so, did you notice any crashes in php or in mod_deflate for example?
-does your application use any unix signals? Corresponding functions are available in for example pcntl php extension.

It will be pleasant for us to work with you in order to resolve the issues.