Features / Usability

just FYI then:

From what I last recall reading, php accelerators are basically caching mechanisms (well, Zend's is more than that but I won't go into details here).

In ionCube's PHPA at least, the speed improvement happens because the PHPA zend extension (a simple entry in your php.ini) caches the compiled versions of unchanged scripts. That way, (according to ionCube):

"... by caching, the Accelerator eliminates:

* reading of source code
* parsing of source code
* compiled code generation
* many memory allocation and copying operations
* disk related operations

..."