In my quest to minimize the memory usage of our beloved blogging platform, WordPress, I came across eAccelerator.  After using Zend Server, and experiencing the performance boost their caching mechanism created, I started looking for something that would work easily with cPanel/WHM.  Lo and behold, there exists a program called eAccelerator which is quoted as being “a free open source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache.”

Immediately, I saw the average WordPress memory usage go from 14MB to less than 8MB.  That is roughly 57% percent of the original memory usage.  Needless to say, I was quite pleased with the results!

Thoughts: In other languages, such as C# and Java, one has the ability to introduce libraries as needed without the extra burden of loading every last file, like in WordPress.  Would it be possible to come up with a custom autoload function to do the same sort of thing?  I believe Joomla uses a similar idea with the jimport() function.