XCache is a open-source opcode cacher, which means that it accelerates the performance of PHP on servers. It optimizes performance by removing the compilation time of PHP scripts by caching the compiled state of PHP scripts into the shm (RAM) and uses the compiled version straight from the RAM. This will increase the rate of page generation time by up to 5 times as it also optimizes many other aspects of php scripts and reduce serverload.

The XCache project is lead by mOo who is also a developer of Lighttpd. Lighttpd is one of the fastest webserver programs and outperforms Apache and many other open source webserving projects so the same is being done to XCache.

http://xcache.lighttpd.net/wiki/Introduction#IntroductiontoXCache