Most likely you have apc.enable_cli set to 1, you can check with php -i | grep apc php -i | grep apc .
Another way to test everything in order to start the composer is to run the installer in test mode:
curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --check
APC is completely destroyed by PHAR (at least in CLI mode), and in any case, the CLI does not provide any caching, since each process is independent, so disabling it makes sense, the flag exists only for debugging AFAIK.
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