[Debian] Installing APC

APC is a PHP accelerator (like eAccelerator or XCache) but dedicated for PHP5. It can reduce PHP script runtime by a factor 5 to 10. Unfortunately it’s not packaged in Debian Etch but you can still install it easily using pear’s repositories.

Install PEAR

aptitude install php-pear
aptitude install php5-dev apache2-prefork-dev build-essential

Install APC module

pecl install apc

PEAR configuration

vi /etc/php5/conf.d/apc.ini
extension=apc.so
apc.enabled=1
apc.shm_size=30

Adapt the values depending your applications requirements. Then restart apache. You can check if apc is correctly loaded by creating a page with a phpinfo(); call.