The other day I was looking into Zend Server and I was wondering why I would use this? OK, they say it's all tested and mission critical and Enterprise ready etc. But to me that's just the marketing department talking.
Is anyone out there using this product and if so can you share your experiences with it and maybe you could also elaborate on the reason on why you choose this product for your application(s).
Did you find any real benefits to using Zend server?
I have been using Zend Platform(I know you were asking about Zend Server, I'm getting there) and have been very keen on the error reporting tool which you also get with Zend Server.
Whenever an error occurs or an exception is thrown Zend Server stores as much information about it as it can(like for instance what request parameters were being used, where the error occured, time, error message, stack trace, etc.). Also slow script execution is being reported to you.
I really prefer getting those kind of error messages over customers saying something like: "The site is not working. Please fix it".
When using Zend Server in conjunction with Zend Studio it's pretty neat that Zend Debugger comes already preinstalled(but you could have installed it yourself as well).
Also it comes with a php-java-bridge(your java classes can be used in PHP) but I didn't need this.
If you're having a php-based error reporting solution in your web application already or have no use for this nor for the java bridge I'd say that it doesn't really make a difference if you are using Zend Server over your own apache installation(as long as you know how to configure it right).
At least that's my opinion/experience.
I've been using the Developer Edition of Zend Platform which is free. If I had to pay for Zend Platform/Server I don't think I would be using it. But that really depends on the project.
Zend Server is about a lot more than having a tested and supported stack. Andre touched on one of the features in Zend Server, that being monitoring. Monitoring watches your PHP script execution for certain conditions and if a certain threshold is passed, the context of that request will be recorded for you to examine at a later point in time. When I work onsite with customers who are having application problems the first thing I do is install Zend Server and turn monitoring on. Within a few minutes I usually have at least a pretty good theory as to what their problem is.
In Zend Server 5 that was taken to a much higher with the introduction of the Code Tracing feature which does runtime instrumentation of almost every individual function/method call made over the course of a request. It is kind of like a combination of debugging and profiling which is done during runtime. In many cases it is possible to diagnose a problem in a production environment without actually replicating the problem.
There are several other features that you can use as well. The Job Queue is a big one for me which I use pretty extensively. I have an example of how to use it at Do you queue? Introduction to the Zend Server Job Queue
There are also two different caching features, the PHP-Java bridge (which Andre had also alluded to) and Optimizer+ which is one of the fastest opcode accelerators available.