Folks,

I'm developing a website based on Wordpress (2.5.1) and I'm struggling a little bit with performance. Accessing the site for the first time is a bit sluggish - very occasionally exceeding the default 30 second processing limit (although I know I can increase that). Subsequent accesses are generally pretty responsive - if I then stop accessing the site for a while and come back, the same scenario described above is repeated. I'm not expecting a significant volume of traffic to the site (at least not initially) so the quiet periods between visitor accesses may be sufficient that they too experience the sluggish initial access to the site.

So, I'm guessing that it might be worthwhile considering some form of PHP Acceleration or caching to compile some or all of the PHP scripts into their bytecode equivalents to bypass a lot of the normal lexical analysis and interpreting that would normally take place.

So, I'm looking at the Alternative Cache Package (ACP) which can be installed via PEAR - the question is - is this approach even worth considering. I've managed to install a local copy of PEAR (using go-pear.php) and that seemed to go smoothly enough - however, then trying to install the ACP package resulted in the following error:

downloading APC-3.0.19.tgz ...
Starting to download APC-3.0.19.tgz (115,735 bytes)
......................
...done: 115,735 bytes
47 source files, building
running: msdev APC.dsp /MAKE "APC - Release"

Warning: popen(msdev APC.dsp /MAKE "APC - Release" 2>&1,r) [function.popen.php]: No error in D:\mydomain.com\wwwroot\resources\scripts\php\pear \PEAR\PEAR\Builder.php on line 442
ERROR: failed to run `msdev APC.dsp /MAKE "APC - Release"'
View package information
Obviously it's having a problem compiling the APC package? Should I be trying to compile this package locally instead and then copying it to the RFH servers? Any ideas - or is either APC or PEAR installed on the RedFoxHosting WinTel servers? I had a quick peek via phpinfo() and couldn't find anything of note....

Regards,

Shane