Optimizing worker_processes, worker_connections & PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN - Any Good Tutorial?

[Reinis Rozitis]

> I read somewhere that 2 PHP processes do not share APC cache. So if I
> have 10 PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN - that means 10 times cache size.

That could be true if the php processes are spawned seperatly (by webserver) 
each time a client request comes in - which is slow as hell (and somewhat 
mimics the apache forking mechanism).

The preferred way (especially for high concurrency) is to spawn the php as 
permanent process and the webserver (nginx) talks to it through fastcgi  ( 
http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpFcgiModule ) - (you just provide ip:port - 
which gives you also the ability if needed to use multiple boxes) that way 
all the php processes have the same APC opcode cache / shared memory (and 
there is no need to recompile script each time a new child is spawned). Not 
to mention other benefits like persistant connections (to memcache / db / 
etc) which aren't killed each time a request finishes but reused on next.

spawn-fcgi was kinda early way to do this (came from lighttpd) but now the 
inbuilt FPM sapi has much more control and options (like to kill processes 
which run for too long / monitor/backtrace the code) to miss the opportunity 
to try it out.

rr