Lighttpd web server and php eAccelerator cache problem

eAccelerator is a fork of MMCache which provide an opcode cache and encode i.e. it increases performance of php based application by providing web (content) caching for dynamic apps.

Recently one of Linux box, which runs Lighttpd, started to sever php pages very slowly. First, I thought server might be severing large amount of request but netstat just return over 600 connection:
$ netstat -vtn | wc -l

Output:

649

System load was under control:
$ uptime
Output:

12:09:32 up 87 days, 11:58,  1 user,  load average: 1.08, 1.19, 1.06

No zombie process were found. Next I had gone through server logs and error logs and found nothing special. I did restarted both Lightttpd and MySQL servers. Memory usage was under control. HTML pages was loading fine, it was php application. All php based application was taking time to load (but no connection time out error). It was clear something was wrong with PHP.

So I started to investigate all php related installed extension. I found eAccelerator installed on system. I went to /chroot/var/cache/php-eaccelerator and I found over 5000+ files.

I had just deleted all cached files and voila! My problem was solved php started to work normally:
# rm -f *
# /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart


I guess now I need to write a script that will delete cahce on regular basis.

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