I’ve been enjoying using the keg [homebrew-php](https://github.com/josegonzalez/homebrew-php/) by `josegonzalez` in order to run the latest versions of PHP, like `PHP 5.4` on Mac running OS X 10.8 Snow Leopard.
I also like to use Ubuntu on some cloud web servers and have been noticing a huge improvement in performance when the `php` module `apc` is installed / enabled.
Recently I learned that I can get this same performance boost on in my development environment on my mac by using `apc` here too.
Just install it with homebrew:
brew install php54-apc
The module will be installed and enabled, and on my system it created a new config file called `ext-apc.ini` in the directory `/usr/local/etc/php/5.4/conf.d` and it has some great defaults:
[apc]
extension=”/usr/local/Cellar/php54-apc/3.1.10/apc.so”
apc.enabled=1
apc.shm_segments=1
apc.shm_size=64M
apc.ttl=7200
apc.user_ttl=7200
apc.num_files_hint=1024
apc.mmap_file_mask=/tmp/apc.XXXXXX
apc.enable_cli=0
One key here is that `apc.shm_size` needs to be set, and that it also needs to have the suffix `M` or I guess you could use `K` if you wanted a really small `shm_size` but honestly `64M` works pretty great.
