Recently, I’ve switched some of my web servers that handle large file downloads from spawn-cgi to PHP-FPM. The result is that I can handle more large files with more PHP-CGI processes while my site still loads well even if there’s many concurrent downloads going on.
I am still experimenting with PHP-FPM but it seems like a pretty good way to go as far as handling the PHP-CGI processes.
To do this, you will need to install EPEL & CentALT repositories:
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://centos.alt.ru/repository/centos/5/x86_64/centalt-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
Then do:
yum install php-fpm
to install php-fpm.
Edit the file /etc/php-fpm.conf
and my suggested setting changes:
<value name=”user”>apache</value>
<value name=”group”>apache</value>
The max_children is set to 1 as default, set it to something like 50, this really is the cool part about php-fpm.
<value name=”max_children”>50</value>
PHP-FPM doesn’t allow for root user and group so I set it to apache. You will also need to set your web directories to apache user and group by doing:
chown apache:apache /mywebdirectory
Start the PHP-FPM by doing:
/sbin/service php-fpm start
If you get some kind of session errors, simply erase all the session files where the error shows.
For CentOS, you can do:
chkconfig php-fpm on
so it will start whenever your webserver is rebooted.
If you have been using fastcgi, make sure to do:
chkconfig fastcgi off
so it doesn’t interfere.