Installing eAccelerator requires a matter of minutes of your time. Please read through all the steps before proceeding!

  1. sudo apt-get install build-essential re2c php5 php5-dev
  2. sudo mkdir -p /var/cache/eaccelerator
  3. sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/cache/eaccelerator
  4. sudo chmod 0644 /var/cache/eaccelerator
  5. wget http://bart.eaccelerator.net/source/0.9.5.3/eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.tar.bz2
  6. tar xjvf eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.tar.bz2
  7. cd eaccelerator-0.9.5.3
  8. phpize
  9. ./configure
  10. make && sudo make install
  11. sudo chmod 0644 /usr/lib/php5/20060613/eaccelerator.so
  12. sudo nano /etc/php5/conf.d/eaccelerator.ini (see below)
  13. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

In step 12 input the following content for eaccelator.ini:

extension="eaccelerator.so"
eaccelerator.shm_size="16"
eaccelerator.cache_dir="/var/cache/eaccelerator"
eaccelerator.enable="1"
eaccelerator.optimizer="1"
eaccelerator.check_mtime="1"
eaccelerator.debug="0"
eaccelerator.filter=""
eaccelerator.shm_max="0"
eaccelerator.shm_ttl="0"
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period="0"
eaccelerator.shm_only="0"
eaccelerator.compress="1"
eaccelerator.compress_level="9"

All done! It really does help improve the performance of WordPress blogs and similar projects.