How come eAccelerator works after changing files even though cache is on?

Question

I have eAccelerator installed on an apache web server for PHP.
If I look at the phpinfo() output, I can see that all files are cached.
I wonder to myself,
If they are cached, how come when I make changes to the PHP files it
works immediately without needing to flush the cache?

Does eAccelerator check the timestamp of the files? and if so,
is there a way to disable it and manually flush the cache to increase performace?
(by cancelling the timestamp checking)

Answer 1

eAccelerator checks the timestamp of files to figure out if it needs to recompile it based on what it has in cache. Manually managing this process sounds like it would actually slow things down.