APC (Alternative PHP Cache) is a PHP extension that caches and optimizes the opcodes generated by the Zend Engine. It stores precompiled PHP scripts in shared memory, improving performance by avoiding the need to parse and compile scripts on each request. APC offers opcode caching, content caching using functions like apc_add(), and upload progress reporting. Benchmark tests showed that using APC can nearly double the requests per second and reduce the average request time by over half compared to not using a opcode cache.