I am using this tutorial to install nginx, php and mysql on my new web server.
The tutorial is using ISPConfig 3 and there is an option to whether use FastCgi or PHP-FPM.
I am wondering which is better of the two. In terms of performance and speed, which of the two is the best to use inline with nginx?
BTW, I have also memcached and xcache enabled on my server.
PHP-FPM is much better than the old FastCGI handling of PHP. As of PHP 5.3.3 PHP-FPM is in core and the old FastCGI implementation isn’t available anymore.
My answer was just down voted (after being online for quite some time) and I understand why, so here is a list why PHP-FPM is actually better than the old FastCGI implementation.
First of all, it was known for quite some time that the FastCGI implementation is bad in the PHP community. A page that documents that can be found at https://wiki.php.net/ideas/fastcgiwork where it says:
php-cgi is not useful in production environment without additional “crutches” (e.g. spawn-fcgi from lighttpd distribution or php-fpm patch). This project assumes integration of such “crutches” and extending php-cgi to support for different protocols.
- daemonization (detach, pid file creation, setup environment variables, setuid/setgid/chroot)
- graceful restart
- separate and improve transport layer to allow support for different protocols
- support for SCGI protocol
- support for subset of HTTP protocol
- …
Here is a list of the things that PHP-FPM does better that was taken from http://php-fpm.org/about/:
- PHP daemonization: pid file, log file,
setsid(),setuid(),setgid(),chroot()- Process Management. Ability to “gracefully” stop and start PHP workers without losing any queries. This allows gradually updating the configuration and binary without losing any queries.
- Restricting IP addresses from which requests can come from.
- Dynamic number of processes, depending on the load (adaptive process spawning).
- Starting the workers with different uid/gid/chroot/environment and different
php.inioptions (no need for safe mode).- Logging
STDOUTandSTDERR.- Ability to emergency restart all the processes in the event of an accidental destruction of the shared memory opcode cache, if using an accelerator.
- Forcing the completion of process if
set_time_limit()fails.Additional features: - Error header - Accelerated upload support -
fastcgi_finish_request()- Slowlog with backtrace
One small correction: the PHP FastCGI SAPI is still available, even on PHP 5.5.x.
[root@zulu1 ~]# /usr/local/php54/bin/php-cgi -v
PHP 5.4.17 (cgi-fcgi) (built: Jul 18 2013 05:12:07)
Copyright (c) 1997-2013 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2013 Zend Technologies
On the fastcgi side:
On the php-fpm side:
