Zend or Ioncube

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Posted by majordude, 04-08-2008, 11:13 AM
I run some scripts that either require Zend or Ioncube (my choice). Is one better than the other in terms of performance or overhead? I think I'd rather install one module instead of both on my server.
Posted by phpa, 04-08-2008, 11:50 AM
This depends on the scripts and you would need to try both to be definitively sure. If you don't need to run ionCube and Zend scripts then just for simplicities sake it would make sense only to install what you need, but in terms of performance, we've found that it doesn't make any difference whether you install one or both components when we've tested this. Both Zend Optimiser and the ionCube Loader need to read the start of each PHP file to determine whether it's encoded or not, and this adds a very small amount of overhead that we measured as about the same for both. If you install both components it would be the Loader that does the check first (you must install the Loader before ZO), and if ZO does the same check the same data will have just been read, probably cached by the OS, and returned much quicker the second time around. As a result the overhead of both together is about the same as either one individually. The only exception here would be if your server is configured as CGI, and in which case you pay a hit on each request for every shared library linked and you definitely want to select one library and not both. With all other things being equal, one factor to consider is that ZO will also optimise any non-encoded files that you happen to have. This may be good, but could be bad as optimising can slow requests down overall if the optimisation times are longer than the execution gains. If you have the chance, run a few benchmarks to see how ZO impacts the server and take that into account.
Posted by majordude, 04-08-2008, 12:40 PM
Thanks. I'll try Zend now.
Posted by umbrahosting, 04-08-2008, 02:08 PM
We run Zend on our servers and users can put the ioncube loaders in their directory if they need to use encoded files.

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