DigitMemo.com

The Zend Optimizer can accelerate php execution speed greatly. However, in some shared web hosting service, its not pre-installed and self installation is only available to accounts with shell access. It’s more of a marketing gimmick than technology limitation.

The Zend Optimizer is a freeware tool for parsing pre-compiled PHP files. These PHP files must first have been compiled with the Zend Encoder which however is not a freeware. The advantage of pre-compiled files is that they do not need to be parsed repeatedly and therefore execute faster.

The actual installation on a bare sever does require shell access(and root privilege), however, on a shared host, everything is settled and all you need to do is to plug the optimizer and let it go.

You may try to install the Zend Optimizer with a FTP Client(I use FileZilla but any would be fine), a text editor(notepad is enough) and a file archiver(7-zip works great). All are freeware or comes with system.

• Get the Zend Optimizer from Zend website, free registration required.
• Extract the download with file the archiver
• Create a php file with the following content and save it as “phpinfo.php”

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

uploading to the root directory of your web

• Navigate your browser to this php file, like http://www.yourdomain.com/phpinfo.php

The header shows the php version, scrolling down, search “DOCUMENT_ROOT”, and this is the absolute path on the remote server, it looks something like /server/homepages/30/d1125358621/htdocs/

• Go to the directory where the Zend Optimizer has been unpacked. Go to “data” directory. Here you can see various directories named according to PHP versions, e.g. 4_4_x_comp. Go the the directory of your choice per the php version in your webhost. The important file is ZendOptimizer.so
• Upload this file into a directory of your choice within your webspace
• Create a php.ini file in local machine with the following content:
  

  zend_optimizer.optimization_level=15

  zend_extension=/server/homepages/30/d1125358621/htdocs/ZendOptimizer.so

  and then upload the file to the root directory of your webspace.

• Reload the phpinfo.php file to ensure the Zend Optimizer is working.

Source: DigitMemo.com