eaccelerator + zend + ioncube = working

That sounds like a really useful piece of info to share!

 

is eAccelerator much better than mod_gzip?

 

but both does compression, right? If they are not related then would they complement each other or conflict?

Anyway, my main question is that should I remove mod_gzip if I am installing eaccelerator?

 

The two are unrelated, so I wouldn't remove mod_gzip just because you have installed eAccelerator. I had made some false assumptions about exactly what eAccelerator does on one of my Websites and Jeff Moore (who is pretty high up on the PHP community food chain) helped set me straight. You can see my post and his comments by clicking here.

My VPS was originally on Plesk and very slow in delivering PHP generated pages. Between Cpanel and eAccelerator I saw pages delivered in about only a fourth of the time it had taken with Plesk. I think one of the reasons for this is that Plesk (from what I have observed) relies mostly on RPMs, while Cpanel rebuilds various packages right on the server. I'm very pleased with Cpanel!

-Bryan

 

From the explanation given in that link, here is what I understand. Just need clarification if what I understood was wrong.

eAccelerator basically is a combination of Zend Optimizer + mod_gzip? But bear in mind that the encoding of php on zend and eA are exclusively different.

eA's compression and cache is on php level where as mod_gzip is only compression on apache level. So, both of these products overlap up to certain degree only.

Thus, installing eA would yield improvement only if your website is using a lot of PHP. Whereas mod_gzip would benefit sites with php or html or cgi because the final content are compressed.

Mod_gzip lower the bandwidth usage whereas eA lower internal transfer (cpu/memory/hdd) + bandwidth usage.

Correct whatever parts you think I am wrong.

My final question is still, would installing eAccelerator improve my server's performance that is already running mod_gzip? Should I disable the DRM encoding part for eA, since I don't need that feature. Some other sites do need to use ZendOpt.

 

As you said, mod_gzip simply saves bandwidth and in the process puts a heavy burden on the server. Adding eA is unlikely to help that and could likely make it worse. Unless you need to save the bandwidth you shouldn't have mod_gzip enabled as it only slows down your server and adds load to the client browser with the compression/decompression (in the same way connections over SSL put load on both server and browser). eA does a good job of speeding up both the serving of PHP pages and improving server performance because of the caching it does.