Problem Averted-

Boy do I feel stupid!
  So my problem was just that FastCGI was doing its job.  I set the growth and
decay values to be low in hopes of getting a quickly dynamic pool of processes.
 What I wasn't realizing, is that what I was doing really didn't need more than
one process.
  Despite a concurrency of 20-40 requests at a time from ApacheBench, PHP was
processing the requests just as fast as they came in, not creating a large
enough input queue to spawn more processes.

  Adding a sleep(5) [simulating a longer running script] into my perl and php
scripts caused me to get 20-45 interpreters running.

  So it is spawning multiple copies of perl and PHP as I want now, managed
entirely from the fastCGI process manager rather than from php itself (which
would be rather frustrating to have since I have some accounts which receive
enormous numbers of request and some that may get one a day- making it silly to
have 4-8 interpreters for that user).

  And the SUEXEC problem just means that I need to add variables I"m trying to
pass to SUEXEC's allow list so they're not stripped.

Thank you for your help (now if only the question was actually worthwhile).

-M

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