Hi there
Not strictly an nginx question but don’t know where else to ask and I
think some of you will have valuable opinions on this!
nginx <-- fastcgi --> php
Is it better to have 1 PHP master process on 1 port re-spawning many
children, or many PHP masters on many ports spawning fewer children?
E.g. one master with e.g. 32 worker children on 1 port, or 4 masters
with 8 children each on 4 ports?
Initial thoughts would be more masters as it’s a multi-core box, but
not sure, if all cores are switching and respawning could that get
expensive?
Many thanks for any input …
Igor
From PHP performance perspective, one master with 32 children will do
better
because they will share more memory pages and have slightly smaller
memory
footprint. Besides, the master process doesn’t do anything other than
re-spawning dead children, which is a rare event.
There is one case when you might want multiple master processes, though.
If your server handles multiple sites with different databases, you may
want
to separate them on one php pool per database basis. The reason is that
in
databases queries can stall until another query terminates (particularly
in
MySQL with MyISAM tables). So, if the query takes significant time
compared
to the request rate, the whole php pool will get stuck waiting for the
database. If your other sites are handled by other php pools they’ll
have
little to no impact, otherwise they’ll stall as well.
Thanks very much Denis, excellent stuff.
best wishes
Igor