optimize for WordPress

I'm building a new cPanel server whose only job will be to host 400 WordPress blogs. These are managed by my customers (I don't trust them and they don't trust each other) and they're allowed to self-install unlimited Themes/Plugins/Widgets directly from their WP admin dashboards (code that none of us trust).

To make this work properly, I need PHP to execute under the user-ID of the customer -- PHP cannot run as "nobody" (so I guess I need the suPHP handler not DSO).

Some customers get carried away with Themes/Plugins/Widgets and their blog home pages become really slow due to PHP interpreter startup. I think I need a PHP accelerator. Which should I use? My current choices are:

root@mail [~]# /scripts/phpextensionmgr list
Available Extensions:
IonCubeLoader
EAccelerator
Zendopt
Xcache
PHPSuHosin
SourceGuardian
root@mail [~]#

I don't necessarily need/want anything that will protect/encrypt source code because I'm only running other people's open-source PHP.

I do want something that will compile the PHP into bytecode to improve response times.

Any suggestions?

My research:
IonCubeLoader -- encrypts, but does it help perf?
EAccelerator -- endoflife?
Zendopt -- endoflife?
Xcache -- endoflife?
PHPSuHosin -- encrypts, but does it help perf?
SourceGuardian -- ????

Page More about PHP Handlers - Documentation - cPanel Documentation says that EAccelerator & XCache cannot work with suPHP handler, which I need. Perhaps other accelerators also cannot work with suPHP ???

I'm building out a new cPanel server on AWS and plan to run the latest stable versions of everything. I really just want to get a good PHP accelerator working, so I can let that dictate any other config choices. Would appreciate pointers from any experienced admins.

Thanks,
x

 

I ended up recompiling Apache with:

disabled: suphp
enabled: Mod FastCGI
enabled: Opcache

(Opcache was added recently as a core PHP module, which probably explains why Xcache and similar are all end-of-life but still mentioned in tons of older forum posts.)

I set my PHP handler to fcgi and enabled Apache suexec. This makes PHP run under each customers' identity but it's insanely fast compared to what I had before.

For hosting WordPress, I also enabled gzip compression for all text responses, set 1-hour cache lifetimes, and enabled HTTP keep-alives, all of which really helped since WordPress gets so fat with all the separate JS/CSS files from different plugins. Under Apache Configuration -> Pre Main Include, I used these lines to globally enable compression and caching on all websites:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/x-javascript application/javascript
</IfModule>

# Cache Control Settings for one hour cache
<FilesMatch ".(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=3600, public"
</FilesMatch>

<FilesMatch ".(xml|txt)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=3600, public, must-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>