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Accepted
João Pinto Jerónimo
Asked: 2012-02-11 14:34:07 +0800 CST

How to effectively have less php-cgi processes running?

  • 772

My server is a Linode 512, and on it I run a Wordpress MU with 3 websites (they don't get a lot of visitors) and a couple of NodeJS apps.

I need to switch to Lighttpd because Apache 2 was using about 59% of the server's RAM, and now I have the php-cgi processes taking up about 43.6% of the server's RAM:

  • most often 2 processes use 16.5% of the RAM each,
  • 4 processes use 1.8% of the RAM each, and
  • 4 more processes use 0,8% of the RAM, each

How can I have less of these processes ? I'm almost sure they're not all needed for the trafic this server gets...

I tried only allowing 2 children, but I still have those 10... This is my fastcgi.server section in lighttpd.conf.

fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>
                    ( "localhost" =>
                      (
                        "socket" => "/var/run/lighttpd/php-fastcgi.socket",
                        "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi",
                        "bin-environment" => (
                          "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "2",
                          "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "4000"
                         )
                      )
                    )
                  )

What else can I do to tune lighttpd to use less RAM ?

php lighttpd php-cgi

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If you set bin-path then lighttpd is responsible for spawning fcgi processes, limited by:

    "max-procs" => <integer>,             # optional - when omitted, default is 4

    Environment variable PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN is an additional hint to php executable to internally spawn more processes, you can set it to zero.

    You don't specify max-procs so there is 4 procs spawned by lighty and each of them has two additional childrens -- 4[max-procs] * (1+2[PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN]).

    • 4

  2. Check out the lighttpd documentation regarding php-cgi. It seems that you may need to set the max-procs directive to limit the total number of children processes.

    • 1