Install APC on Windows XP

Yesterday, I wrote about installing APC on my (Linux) web server. Today, I will share with you my notes on how to install Alternative PHP Cache (APC) on Windows.

Installing APC on Windows XP is the easiest thing to do. Unfortunately, looking for the .dll file is not!

Since I am using PHP 4.+, I will just link to the files that are relevant to version 4.

Download and save the php_apc.dll file to your PHP extensions folder. On my PC, this folder is located here:
C:\Program Files\php\php-4.4.2-Win32\extensions

As soon as you have successfully downloaded the file, you will have to edit your php.ini.

Open php.ini with your favourite text editor and insert a line like this:

...
;extension=php_yaz.dll
;extension=php_zip.dll
extension=php_apc.dll

Since I see no reason for me to tweak the APC configurations, I didn't insert any custom APC configuration values to the php.ini file. But if this is what you want to do, some of these options need to be set inside your php.ini file. One such configuration option is the:

apc.shm_size	"30"	PHP_INI_SYSTEM

For those of you who don't already know it, the PHP_INI_SYSTEM in there means that this directive may only be set in the php.ini or Apache's httpd.conf files.

Save the php.ini file and restart Apache and you're ready to experiment using APC functions in your php scripts.

Very soon, I will include an article here with a simple PHP script to demonstrate how you could use APC functions in your PHP scripts, even existing ones!