I am debating whether I should use this. I am running a LEMP stack on CentOS 6 with php-fpm. Any suggestions or alternative recommendations?

_________________
One of the very few Americans who travelled the world and can communicate in 7 languages.

Most people use it. Defiantly worth it Eventually it will become part of PHP core.

_________________
Paid support
How to ask for help
1. Give details of your problem
2. Post any errors
3. Post relevant logs.
4. Don't hide details i.e. your domain, it just makes things harder
5. Be polite or you'll be eaten by a grue

APC was a sort of "alternative" when it first came out, but nowdays there is nothing alternative about it. Simply installing it gives you an instant performance boost, up to 2x and sometimes even more. Who wouldn't want to use it?

"Alternatives" to APC include XCache and eAccelerator. (Let's not count proprietary Zend products.) XCache was developed by the lighttpd team to increase performance and stability in the FastCGI environment, at a time when APC used to be somewhat buggy. But nowadays, APC works perfectly with FPM, too. It's also been a few years since I've heard of anybody using eAccelerator. APC is now the de facto standard.

I use it with all of my PHP projects. It's especially helpful if you're running large PHP apps like MediaWiki or WordPress. Many PHP apps are also programmed to take advantage of APC when it's installed by storing data in the 'user cache' to cut down on database queries. APC is definitely worth installing.

Ok, thanks guys.

_________________
One of the very few Americans who travelled the world and can communicate in 7 languages.