I work for a pretty big PHP shop. Our opcode cache has some issues with this, but our stat-cache is ok. Inside the code we unpack the symlink, so internally we are pointing to files like ~/releases/<id>/codebase/HTML/index.php instead of ~/codebase/HTML/index.php

Because of the opcode issues we still do a rolling restart of the apaches but we don't see them a lot.

We use `rename` instead of `mv`. Don't know why :)

edit: this also handles the problem of suddenly referencing different files mid-request. Because you don't