# Is it better to upstream php processes via nginx or use a front facing load balancer? **URL:** \ **Category:** NGINX\ **Created:** [September 9, 2009, 6:46pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-it-better-to-upstream-php-processes-via-nginx-or-use-a-front-facing-load-balancer/175208 "2009-09-09T18:46:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![iberci](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/i/a3d4f5/32.png) [@iberci](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/iberci)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2009, 6:46pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-it-better-to-upstream-php-processes-via-nginx-or-use-a-front-facing-load-balancer/175208/1 "2009-09-09T18:46:22Z")
Hi, Is it better to use a hardware load balancer in front of multiple nginx boxes, each running their own php processes or is it better to use nginx’s upstream functionality and round robin php requests? ---
**Author:** ![iberci](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/i/a3d4f5/32.png) [@iberci](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/iberci)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 11:35am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-it-better-to-upstream-php-processes-via-nginx-or-use-a-front-facing-load-balancer/175208/2 "2009-09-10T11:35:34Z")
How high traffic have your sites got? In my system, Nginx plays a role of a LB and static file server. It dispatches .php requests to a pool of Apache instances and PHP FCGI. It works great for 600 000+ page views per day. Ilan B. wrote: > Hi, > Is it better to use a hardware load balancer in front of multiple nginx > boxes, each running their own php processes or is it better to use > nginx’s > upstream functionality and round robin php requests? ---
**Author:** ![iberci](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/i/a3d4f5/32.png) [@iberci](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/iberci)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 1:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-it-better-to-upstream-php-processes-via-nginx-or-use-a-front-facing-load-balancer/175208/3 "2009-09-10T13:49:39Z")
1.6mm page views per day and growing (all dynamic php), this does not inclue a large number of static files (mostly mp3 files) being served as well. Nginx is serving both PHP and static files all from the same server. Main bottleneck right now is PHP processes getting overloaded, probably due to high number of connections (we are working on reducing this number - we have some inefficiencies where a single page may make over 120 requests before completely loading). The other issue is the number of database requests per page can be very high which delays PHP response times and increases queue. Regardless, we need to add another box, but I’m trying to figure out if best approach is physical LB in front of duplicate nginx boxes, i.e. each box serving both PHP and static files OR more complex solution with one of the boxes acting as master and routing PHP requests via Nginx to other boxes, etc. as well as possibly adding a static server specifically for images and mp3 files. ---
**Author:** ![iberci](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/i/a3d4f5/32.png) [@iberci](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/iberci)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 3:07pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-it-better-to-upstream-php-processes-via-nginx-or-use-a-front-facing-load-balancer/175208/4 "2009-09-10T15:07:31Z")
We use nginx as a pure LB. All php sessions and static files are shared to all apache 2 webheads via OCFS2. Then we use upstream fair, and removed the need for sticky sessions ( by using a clustered FS to share the session files to all nodes) This lets every image/html/php request go to different webheads for maximum response for the EU. Also we wrote it so if nginx gets a proxy error, it marks the webhead as bad and reprocess the request until it finds a good webhead to proxy to. Btw use use apache webheads so we can use php as a module rather than fcgi and spawn php type methods. Hope it helps David