109things has just been given a speed bump.

This is all due to XCache, a wonderful open-source PHP opcode cacher that is fast and stable.

Installation took about 15 minutes on the first try and everything went smoothly.

XCache even comes with a very useful administration panel that shows you how well (or badly) it is working. Just 10 minutes after using it, i noticed that about 80% of the PHP pages are being loaded from the cache!

Besides XCache, you can also try other open-source alternatives like APC, eAccelerator, php-accelerator and turck-mmcache. If you’d rather splurge instead, check out Zend’s PHP platform offerings.