APC not recommended for production?

Question

I have started having problems with my VPS in the way that it would faill to serve the pages on all the websites. It just showed a blank page, or offered to download the php file ( luckily the code was not in the download file :) ). The server was still running, but this seemed to be a problem with PHP, since i could login into WHM.

If i did a apache restart, the sites would work again.

After some talks with the server support they told me this is a problem with the APC extension witch they considered to be old and not recommended for production servers. So they removed it for now, to see if the same kind of fails would continue to appear.

I haven't read anywhere that APC could have some problems or that its not always recommended to use, quite the contrary ... everywhere people are saying to always use it.

The APC extension was installed ssh and is the latest version.

Edit: They also dont recomend MemCache and say that a more reliable extension would be eAccelerator

Answer 1

Um APC is current tech and almost a must for any performant PHP site.

Not only that but it will ship as standard in PHP 6 (rather than being an optional module like it is now).

I don't know what your issue is/was but it's not APC being outdated or old tech.

Answer 2

Sounds to me like they are pushing a product that they probably have referral kickbacks on.

I run my own servers (have for a while) and I've never had this problem, not any MAJOR problems with MemCache.

Answer 3

I run several servers myself and the only time I have ever had trouble with APC was when trying to run it concurrently with Zend Optimizer. They don't work together so if I must use Optimizer (like if some commercial, third-party code requires it) I run eAccelerator instead of APC. Effectively 6 of one, half-dozen of another when it comes to performance but I really doubt APC is the problem here.

Answer 4

Just to add, memcached is only going to benefit you greatly if you are running multiple servers which need to access a shared data cache. Memcached does not do opcode caching like APC/eAccelerator/Xcache/etc.