How to install xCache on CentOS 7

xcacheXCache is a free and open source PHP opcode cacher. Using xCache you can have better performance of your PHP scripts execution on your linux vps. It can achieve this by eliminating the compilation time of PHP code by caching the compiled version of the PHP code into the memory and later uses the compiled version of the code. This can significantly accelerate the page generation time by up to 5 times faster and also optimizes and increases many other aspects of php scripts and reduces the server load.

In this tutorial we will show you how to install xCache on a CentOS 7 VPS from source.

First of all login to your CentOS 7 VPS and make sure that all packages on your server are up to date

yum -y update

then, install the following packages

yum install -y php-devel gcc make

Once the required packages are installed proceed with the xCache downlod. Go to their official website and grab the latest stable version of xCache. At the moment of writing this article it is version 3.2.0

cd /opt
wget http://xcache.lighttpd.net/pub/Releases/3.2.0/xcache-3.2.0.tar.gz

Unpack the downloaded tarball archive

tar -zxvf xcache-3.2.0.tar.gz

This will create a new ‘xcache-3.2.0’ directory. Go to that directory and

cd xcache-3.2.0

Execute the ‘phpize’ command to prepare xCache as a PHP extension

phpize
Configuring for:
PHP Api Version:         20100412
Zend Module Api No:      20100525
Zend Extension Api No:   220100525

Next, we need to configure, compile and install xCache

./configure --enable-xcache
make
make install

The location of xcache.so is shown in the last step

Installing shared extensions:     /usr/lib64/php/modules/

So, the location of the xCache extension is

/usr/lib64/php/modules/

Now, we need to edit the PHP configuration file. To find its location you can execute

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GET YOUR VPS
php -i |grep php.ini
Configuration File (php.ini) Path => /etc
Loaded Configuration File => /etc/php.ini

Create a configuration file for xCache, and append the following lines

nano /etc/php.d/xcache.ini

[xcache-common]
extension = /usr/lib64/php/modules/xcache.so
[xcache]
xcache.shm_scheme =        "mmap"
xcache.size  =               32M
xcache.count =                 1
xcache.slots =                8K
xcache.ttl   =              3600
xcache.gc_interval =         300
; Same as aboves but for variable cache
; If you don't know for sure that you need this, you probably don't
xcache.var_size  =            0M
xcache.var_count =             1
xcache.var_slots =            8K
xcache.var_ttl   =             0
xcache.var_maxttl   =          0
xcache.var_gc_interval =     300
; N/A for /dev/zero
xcache.readonly_protection = Off
xcache.mmap_path =    "/dev/zero"
xcache.cacher =               On
xcache.stat   =               On

Make sure to add the correct path of the xCache extension.

You can modify the settings in the xcache.ini file according to your needs.

Restart your Apache web server for the changes to take effect

systemctl restart  httpd.service

At this point xCache should be successfully installed on your server. You can confirm that by executing the following command

php -v
PHP 5.4.16 (cli) (built: Oct 31 2014 12:59:36)
Copyright (c) 1997-2013 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2013 Zend Technologies
with XCache v3.2.0, Copyright (c) 2005-2014, by mOo
with XCache Cacher v3.2.0, Copyright (c) 2005-2014, by mOo

Of course you don’t have to do any of this if you use one of our Linux VPS Hosting services, in which case you can simply ask our expert Linux admins to xCache for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.

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