PHP 5.5 Beta-1 has been released.
Zend Opcache has been opensourced, and is now included in PHP as part of core.
APC, otoh, seems to have languished. Development has slowed, and, atm, there's no version/tree that's 5.5.x compatible. APC 3.1.14 which was focused on PHP 5.4+ compat has been pulled due to memory issues; 3.1.13 is the most current stable release.
Reading the lists and the tea-leaves, it appears that most, if not all, resources will henceforth be applied to development/maintenance of Zend Opcache.
I, like numerous others, have used APC with Drupal for ages as part of the caching stack.
With the coming move to Zend Opcache in PHP Core, and the possible redundancy -- if not abandonment -- of APC, what effects/changes will this have on Drupal 7x/8x server deployment?
I guess the right question is: what needs to be done -- change, mod, config, etc -- to a D7/D8 install to get it ready for ZendOpcache?
Comments
Long term support for 5.3.10
Drupal 8 requires 5.3.10.
This is the version that is in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which is supported until 2017.
So, we have plenty of time to deal with the transition, if any.
I don't see any changes in the application code. The optimizer eventually will be Zend rather than APC, and Drupal should not care much, until Drupal 9.x or more.
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
That clarifies the 'rear' end
That clarifies the 'rear' end of the curve, thx.
I'm not sure from your comment, tho, whether PHP 5.5 -- for those of us using it -- should be expected to "play nice" with D7 & D8, since it 'requires' 5.3.10. Does that 'require' mean that version and ONLY that version? I'd guess not ...
Also, for those who use APC for more/other than opcode as a cache backend (I did long ago; not anymore ...), there will perhaps be some changes in settings.php, e.g..
...
$conf += array(
'cache_backends' => array(
'sites/all/modules/contrib/apc/drupal_apc_cache.inc',
...
'cache_default_class' => 'DrupalAPCCache',
'cache_class_cache_bootstrap' => 'DrupalAPCCache',
'cache_class_cache' => 'DrupalAPCCache',
'cache_class_cache_bootstrap' => 'DrupalAPCCache',
...
etc, etc, etc
if APC stops getting any support with php 5.4+.
Requirements are here
The requirements are here for Drupal 7.
http://drupal.org/requirements
Says (5.2.5 or later), and (5.3 recommended), so I would stick with that. I doubt it is tested much with 5.4 or later. You could run the tests on it and report it in the issue queue.
You should not use APC as a data cache, since fragmentation makes it perform poorly. For data caching, memcached is more robust.
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
Says (5.2.5 or later), and
Not what I'd hoped to hear, but ...
yep.
sure, APC as a data cahce is a mess. I typically varnish & memcached backends; memcache-session finally looks stable enough to add to the mix.
Just to clarify
Drupal 7 absolutely supports PHP 5.4 and bugs found should be reported. Most bugs were quickly fixed after 5.4 became stable. There are a large number of sites running Drupal 7 on 5.4.