Zend vs Iconcube

While I don't really know all of the technical details that differentiate each of them, I just wanted to comment on my experience since I'd wager most people who are thinking about purchasing want to know the differences.

When we initially installed the program, the test.php reccomended the Ioncube version.. So we went with that.

As the board grew, we did have some issues with page load times and server performance.

eAccelerator + Zend was reccomended on the vBulletin.com forums by someone on the vBulletin team for people with vbSEO installed, so I went with that suggestion when we moved to a server where we had more control over PHP and SQL versions.

There are also some apparent issues with APC Cache and PHP 5.1.4, so that was another factor.

Current install information:

mysql Ver 14.12 Distrib 5.0.24, for pc-linux-gnu (i686) using readline 5.0
PHP 5.1.4 (cli) (built: Aug 13 2006 15:14:33)
Copyright (c) 1997-2006 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.1.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2006 Zend Technologies
with eAccelerator v0.9.5-rc1, Copyright (c) 2004-2006 eAccelerator, by eAccelerator
with Zend Extension Manager v1.0.10, Copyright (c) 2003-2006, by Zend Technologies
with Zend Optimizer v3.0.1, Copyright (c) 1998-2006, by Zend Technologies

We've noticed a large performance increase in how fast pages load. I don't know if it's from having a cache, or what.. but I'm definitely pleased with the increase in performance.

Might just be anecdotal evidence, so take it with a grain of salt.

Thanks for the heads up liberty

It varies greatly from case to case, I'm sure the support team can confirm this

But, in general, zend is preferred (faster?) to ioncube given a choice?

From my experiences, yes. By far.

Plus, any other software you have that uses zend encoding will benefit from the optimizer and eAccelerator.