For my next trick

Neil was trying to increase the speed of Drupal on one of the New England Region SCCA sites, and he told me about the early success he's had using eAccelerator for caching. So I decided to try it out.

Because my hosting account is a shared-hosting dealie (as opposed to a VPS or the like), and I can't just modify the server's PHP settings, I can't just install eAccelerator. I have to compile my own version of PHP. I took advantage of this to try to strip out all the config options I don't need, since I'm basically compiling a version of PHP just for Drupal. Once all the required libraries had compiled in the proper order, I was ready to download and compile eAccelerator. Then I tweaked my custom PHP binary's .ini file, and I magically have a faster Drupal site. I may have to play around with the settings, as with my infrequent posting, I might be able to get away with really high numbers for time-to-live and other such tweakable settings.