Manuel Lemos - 2011-10-14 01:43:31 -
In reply to message 1 from RamJack
By default the Zend engine compiles PHP into Zend opcodes of each script on every request. But if you use a caching extension, it will store the compiled opcode in memory, so the same PHP script does not have to be compiled again because the first time execution compilation results are loaded from memory.
So, there will be a performance penalty if you are not using a PHP opcode caching extension. This may become more noticeable if you have complex scripts that may need to load many classes running by a busy server.
Still keep in mind that sometimes script execute code that takes a lot more time to execute because they do things like database queries, which often take more time run, making the actual PHP compilation time negligible.