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Zend, ‘the PHP company’ describes Zend Guard/Zend Optimizer as follows:

‘Zend Guard provides independent software vendors and IT managers with the ability to safely distribute and manage the distribution of their PHP applications while protecting their source code.
Zend Optimizer is a free application that runs the files encoded using Zend Guard and enhances the overall performance of your PHP applications.’

Zend make awesome PHP software however if using any applications which rely on Zend Guard/Optimizer and you use Godaddy shared hosting then there are a few steps that are necessary to enable Zend Guard/Optimizer with Godaddy hosting. For example, the

Instructions to install Zend Optimizer / Zend Guard

1. Open a text editor such as notepad or notepad++.

2. Insert the following into the text document:

[Zend]
zend_optimizer.optimization_level=15
zend_extension_manager.optimizer=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer-3.3.3
zend_extension_manager.optimizer_ts=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer_TS-3.3.3
zend_extension=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer-3.3.3/ZendExtensionManager.so
zend_extension_ts=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer_TS-3.3.3/ZendExtensionManager_TS.so

3. Save the file to your local drive as php5.ini

4. Transfer php5.ini to the root of your domain at Godaddy (usually through an FTP application such as Filezilla)

5. Let me know how you get along

Zend Optimizer / Zend Guard and WordPress

I discovered this Godaddy problem/requirement when wanting to test the WordPress Plugin called MultiPress Lite Autoblogging. The error message I received was:

Zend Optimizer not installed

This file was encoded by the Zend Guard. In order to run it, please install the Zend Optimizer (available without charge), version 3.0.0 or later.

Seeing this message instead of the website you expected?

This means that this webserver is not configured correctly. In order to view this website properly, please contact the website’s system administrator/webmaster with the following message:
The component "Zend Optimizer" is not installed on the Web Server and therefore cannot service encoded files. Please download and install the Zend Optimizer (available without charge) on the Web Server.
Note: Zend Technologies cannot resolve issues related to this message appearing on websites not belonging to Zend Technologies.

What is the Zend Optimizer?

The Zend Optimizer is one of the most popular PHP plugins for performance-improvement, and has been available without charge, since the early days of PHP 4. It improves performance by scanning PHP’s intermediate code and passing it through multiple Optimization Passes to replace inefficient code patterns with more efficient code blocks. The replaced code blocks perform exactly the same operations as the original code, only faster.

In addition to improving performance, the Zend Optimizer also enables PHP to transparently load files encoded by the Zend Guard.

The Zend Optimizer is a free product available for download from Zend Technologies. Zend Technologies also developed the PHP scripting engine, known as the Zend Engine.

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