Hey Nancy, not totally sure. It's a VPS server using XEN technology. If anyone can point me on how to find out how much Virtual cores there are, that would be great. But overall, multithreading should help weather it's one processor or more as threads are lightweight compared to processes.

One issue that arose was an internal server error that occurred very very rarely. It seems to be because PHP CGI processes terminate after getting a specific number of requests (500 by default). So apache would abruptly find the prcoess it was talking to terminated and would send a 500 error to the client. That's resolved by either telling PHP never to terminate (and risking memory leaks, which is low I presume?) or by setting the max requests per thread in apache to something less than 500 (I set it to 490).

I'll write a post on D.O once I'm done with more testing. Here's what I'm working on now:

1. APC doesn't work with this configuration (I don't use it anyway). Seems this is resolved by installing php-fpm. I'll try to set it up in the coming few days.
2. With this configuration, and using suexec I can run each virtualhost using a different user. Now that's the ultimate security. If a site is breached, even with PHP filter and exec function, they can't do damage to any other site!
3. You get some added perks of giving each virtualhost its own PHP.INI file, etc

As to going nginx+php-fpm. I don't know if I'm eager to ditch apache. Seems like a MAJOR thing. I am, however, going to try to setup php-fpm with apache. I will look into nginx later on of course and try to accumulate some know-how to see if it's worth-while.




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Ashraf Amayreh
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