APC + Phar Performance (x-post from pecl.dev)

Hey all, After reading this post ( http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/13uwgk/phar_performance/ ), and having my own curiosity of the current state of things, I wanted to dig in an see what the performance of APC with phar files was. I've found some oddities in performance, and I am hoping before I do any deeper investigation, someone might know something. The app is here: https://github.com/ralphschindler/test-phar-performance-apc/ The library I am attempting to introduce to the app is Zend_Db.phar. I chose this b/c I fully know the code base, and the phar clocks in at 519844 bytes uncompressed. It breaks down like this: /index.php - baseline app without addition of library /index-with-filesys.php - Zend_Db library extracted to filesystem /index-with-phar.php - Zend_Db as phar included Without APC, on my machine, I get a slight drop off, but acceptable. With APC, the drop off in performance is very noticable. Even with stat=0, only in a very specific usage scenario (described below) does it actually nullify phar vs. filesystem. Without APC (enabled=0) ----------------------- $ ab -H "Connection: close" -n 500 http://test.dev/index-with-filesys.php

Requests per second:    111.19 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       8.994 [ms] (mean)

$ ab -H "Connection: close" -n 500 http://test.dev/index-with-phar.php

Requests per second:    87.49 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       11.429 [ms] (mean)

Then APC 3.1.13 (Beta) is introduced, the app is clearly faster on the filesystem, but not nearly as fast one would expect in the phar version: With APC (enabled=1, stat=1) ---------------------------- $ ab -H "Connection: close" -n 500 http://test.dev/index-with-filesys.php

Requests per second:    474.47 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       2.108 [ms] (mean)

$ ab -H "Connection: close" -n 500 http://test.dev/index-with-phar.php

Requests per second:    238.84 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       4.187 [ms] (mean)

With APC (enabled=1, stat=0) ---------------------------- $ ab -H "Connection: close" -n 500 http://test.dev/index-with-filesys.php

Requests per second:    529.02 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1.890 [ms] (mean)

$ ab -H "Connection: close" -n 500 http://test.dev/index-with-phar.php

Requests per second:    246.71 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       4.053 [ms] (mean)

With APC (enabled=1, stat=0) (With include_path hack) ----------------------------------------------------- If this line: require '../vendor/Zend_Db-2.1.0beta1.phar'; is swapped out with this (to ensure the require is relative to include): set_include_path('.:' . realpath(__DIR__ . '/../vendor')); require 'Zend_Db-2.1.0beta1.phar'; I get the following: $ ab -H "Connection: close" -n 500 http://test.dev/index-with-phar.php

Requests per second:    522.68 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1.913 [ms] (mean)

Can someone help me make sense of all this? Here are my questions: * The phar files are listed in the apc_cache_info() with >1 hits, are the stat's to those phar files really much slower than to filesystem files? * Why does the include_path trick affect performance with regards to phar files? -ralph