Handle 700 Percent More Requests Using Squid and APC Cache

This post on www.ilovebonnie.net documents some impressive system performance improvements by the addition of Squid Cache (a caching proxy) and APC Cache (opcode cache for PHP).

  • Apache is able to deliver roughly 700% more requests per second with Squid when serving 1KB and 100KB images.
  • Server load is reduced using Squid because the server does not have to create a bunch of Apache processes to handle the requests.
  • APC Cache took a system that could barely handle 10-20 requests per second to handling 50-60 requests per second. A 400% increase.
  • APC allowed the load times to remain under 5 seconds even with 200 concurrent threads slamming on the server.
  • These two caches are easy to setup and install and allow you to get a lot more performance out of them.

The post has an in-depth discussion and a number of supporting charts. The primary point is how simple it can be to improve performance and scalability by adding caching.