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👉 This post was initially written in 2007 and referred to specific software versions. When tunning your system, always consider which version you are running.

If you are a PHP developer or a LAMP server admin you probably have already heard about the Zend Platform. After some test and configure/tunning step, we deployed this solution on a heavy loaded production server running with Apache 2.x, PHP 4.4.x, MySQL Client 5.x.

The server used for deploy and test the Zend Platform in real production condition is a Bi-Xeon 1,4Ghz with 2Go RAM and 2x36 Go SCSI. This server is part of a cluster made of 10 servers which deliver PHP scripts only. All statics media (gif, css, js, swf, etc.) are delivered throughother dedicated servers.

Statistics Without Zend Platform

  • More than 3.000.000 Hits/Day
  • 30 Hits/sec
  • 60% Average CPU Load

Statistics With Zend Platform

  • More than 10.000.000 Hits/Day
  • 100 Hits/sec
  • 20% Average CPU Load

Zend Platform Results

To sum up

  • Manage 3.5 times more traffic
  • Having 3 times less load
  • Use same quantity of process
  • All the advanced futures for debug, profile, analyze your code
  • Centralize error message easily from multiple front (With stats, alerts, vhost, etc.)
  • HTML Caching solution

Of course, all this stuff could be done with xDebug, xCache and many other Open Source solution, this will depend of your free time for deploying it. The Zend Platform is an “All in One” package with some advanced features and a good interaction between the Platform and your IDE (Zend Studio/Neon).