Today we want to optimize our Nextcloud installation with PHP-APCu, it does not matter which Nextcloud or PHP7 version we use. Depending on the version we replace the „x“ in the commands.

VPS Preparation:

Optional:
If you have big but slow disks like me, you can work with a RAM disk. Condition is, of course, enough RAM in the system.
For this purpose, we create a RAM disk under /tmp/ before we start:

sudo mkdir /tmp/apc

and mount this disk:

sudo mount -t ramfs ramfs /tmp/apc

To make this available after each reboot, we edit the file /etc/fstab:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

and we add the following line:

ramfs   /tmp/apc     ramfs   defaults        0       0

As always, we bring our system up to date:

sudo apt -y update && apt -y upgrade && apt -y full-upgrade 

then we install PHP-APCu

sudo apt install php-apcu

Depending on the version, edit the php.ini (replace the x with the version here)

for php-fpm:

sudo nano /etc/php/7.x/fpm/php.ini

for php-apache-modul:

sudo nano /etc/php/7.x/apache2/php.ini

and enter the following values:

apc.enabled=1
apc.file_update_protection=2
apc.optimization=0
apc.shm_size=256M
apc.include_once_override=0
apc.shm_segments=1
apc.ttl=7200
apc.user_ttl=7200
apc.gc_ttl=3600
apc.num_files_hint=1024
apc.enable_cli=0
apc.max_file_size=5M
apc.cache_by_default=1
apc.use_request_time=1
apc.slam_defense=0
apc.mmap_file_mask=/tmp/apc/apc.XXXXXX
apc.stat_ctime=0
apc.canonicalize=1
apc.write_lock=1
apc.report_autofilter=0
apc.rfc1867=0
apc.rfc1867_prefix =upload_
apc.rfc1867_name=APC_UPLOAD_PROGRESS
apc.rfc1867_freq=0
apc.rfc1867_ttl=3600
apc.lazy_classes=0
apc.lazy_functions=0

Now we have to teach Nextcloud to work with the APCu, we adapt the config.php:

sudo nano /var/www/html/nextcloud/config/config.php

Here we adjust the values „memcache.distributed“ and „memcache.local“ as follows:

'memcache.distributed' => '\\OC\\Memcache\\APCu',
'memcache.local' => '\\OC\\Memcache\\APCu',

Next we restart Apache2 and php-fpm (if used):

sudo systemctl restart php7.x-fpm
sudo systemctl restart apache2

We can verify the success with a php script that we have to load in our webspace

cd /var/www/html/nextcloud
sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/krakjoe/apcu/master/apc.php

Then call the script in our domain via our browser, call https://nextcloud.deine-domain.tld/apc.php:

If we want to look at the „User Cache Entries“, we have to replace the default password in the script „apc.php“:

sudo nano /var/www/html/nextcloud/apc.php

In the script „apc.php“ we have to find this line and adjust accordingly:

defaults('ADMIN_PASSWORD','password');          // Admin Password - CHANGE THIS TO ENABLE!!!

That’s it and have fun… 🙂