Re: Moving to PHP5.1 and Apache 2.2 next year, need help

steve roussey wrote:

Someone else emailed me about using FastCGI with Apache 2.1/event but I just figured that there would be a significant slowdown using FastCGI rather than a module/handler. (Currently I compile PHP into Apache statically and turn off Apache's dynamic module loading ability -- something I couldn't figure out in Apache2). What is your experience with FastCGI?

There are some different benchmarks with lighttpd+php: http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/wiki/ But I only trust my own benchmarks, and here I couldn't measure a really big difference, lighttpd + fastcgi seems to be slightly faster than Apache 1.3 + mod_php with my setup. But I think it depends on your application and setup. A big difference I noticed was used cpu, memory and load - lighttpd was by far more efficient here. If you're benchmarking lighttpd you should have a look at the following chapter from documentation: http://lighttpd.net/documentation/performance.html

Still, I looked at lighttpd and it looks promising. The one thing that started all of this was Apache 2.1's event MPM that used a single thread to handle all open Keep-Alives looked very efficient.

lighttpd does the same, it's a non-blocking webserver with only one process. The one process cares about keep-alives... and delegates handling of PHP-Requests to a number of loadbalanced, persistent PHP Processes using FastCGI. Andreas