A rant about ZendPlatform

[Fred]

This is a small rant about ZendPlatform. Take it with a puff...

My web servers are getting hit with more and more traffic, and things were 
slowing down big time. So I looked into it, and found my assumptions about 
how mod_php works by default is just plain wrong. It does NOT cache the 
bytecode by default. I just have to get out of the silly notion that others 
would write code and design modules the way *I* would have I done it.

So I tried APC initially. That kept failing for some odd reason.

Then I looked at ZendPlatform, a non-FOSS $1000 solution. Installed the free 
eval version on my workstation just to try it out. Didn't work either.  
Didn't have the time to delve deeply into it, so I commented it out in the 
php.ini

I even looked at IonCube, but that's been dead for a while. No workie on PHP 
5.1.2

Then I decided to take another look at APC.  I did managed to get it to work 
on the workstation, but it didn't work on the servers. Puzzled, I looked a 
bit more closely at the php.ini files.

I noticed that on the workstation I had commented out the Zend extension 
lines, whereas on the server they were not commented out (put there by Zend 
Optimizer, I think).

So lo and behold, I got it to work, and it resulted in a dramatic 10x or 
better speedup, since no longer were thousands of lines of PHP code were 
being recompiled on *each* query.

APC is free as in freedom (as well as free beer), so I was delighted not to 
have to fork over $1000!

I noticed, though, on my workstation, that ram and swap space were being 
eaten up. Puzzled, I topped it and saw "java" chewing up 300megs of swap! 
What in the blazes? There were some other processes in there too chewing up 
ram and swap.

They were all related to ZendPlatform. Ouch.

Let's get that baby uninstalled! Let's see, where is the uninstall script? 
Gotta be around here somewhere, right?

No uninstall script. 

So, I searched the documentation for how to uninstall this beast. No text 
readme files that were useful, but there was this big PDF document. 

Hmmm.

So I opened that up and near the end of it, there were 2 pages of uninstall 
instructions!!!! All of it was manual, annoying, and required 10 steps or 
so!

I had to manually switch off the apache cron job -- what, it created an 
apache cron job??!!! I also had to delete this directory, disable that 
deamon, etc, etc.

I did all of this and managed to recover my swap and ram that was swamped by 
ZendPlatform.

Well, folks, I'm peeved. For a $1000 product, I expected *much* better than 
what I saw. I was shocked at all the stuff it added to my system, and fuming 
at the fact I had to undo all of their crap by hand. While I was thinking 
that maybe some of the other features of ZendPlatform might be useful, I now 
get an upset stomach at the thought of all those resources eating up my 
server and slowing it down. And it would've been overkill anyway just for 
its PHP accelerator, which *used* to be a separate product, but is now 
bundled in with all that bloat.

So while I give the Zend Engine and the Zend Optimizer two thumbs up, I give 
ZendPlatform 4 thumbs down.

4 thumbs down?

Yes. I grew two extra hands for the expressed purpose of showing my 
displeasure at the experience. The Zend folks should stop smoking the weed, 
and weed out the problems with the over-bloat of their $1000 product.

-Fred