Rather complex question about chroot and suexec

Hello!

I'm not really sure how, or if, I could get this to work.  I've tried 
installing mod_fastcgi, but I have a feeling, it won't work like that 
with my setup.  Basically, I have lots of virtualhosts, in a structure 
like /www/h/o/host.com/ and through suexec and sshd.. etc they are 
chrooted there.  They just see their own /html /etc /bin... etc.

They all have their own copy of php, which as I'm sure you can imagine, 
is very slow when it's hit very quickly.  FastCGI appears to me to be a 
good solution, ostensibly I could keep my current setup, but I'm not 
quite sure how to do it.  I don't think mod_fastcgi handles the requests 
for .php files after it goes through suexec (it doesn't appear to, I've 
run scripts through php CGI/FastCGI and it doesn't make requests back to 
the server I have setup in httpd.conf and listening on port 9000)

Hopefully that's enough background, I have two questions :

1) Is there any way I can run a local copy of php (and perl) listening 
on a local port for FastCGI requests and some kind of wrapper in the 
chroot, so that all my vhosts use the same installation of php?  (I do 
this for sendmail, as you can't have a sendmail in every chroot, so 
there is a wrapper, that takes sendmail command line and in turn sends 
it to 127.0.0.1:25.)

2) If #1 is plausible (hints or examples would be _greatly_ 
appreciated!) then how do I maintain the chroot?  Is that even 
possible?  Would I have to run a separate process for each vhost?  How 
could I still chroot the scripts to their home directory while reaping 
the benefits of using FastCGI? 

I'm really at a loss, I'm not really sure how all these separate 
elements tie together, I'd be very grateful if someone could illuminate 
my understanding of how this might (or might not) work.

Thank you very much!!
Ben


p.s. if this isn't what I need, or anyone has an opinion of how I can 
speed up my setup, besides the obvious of going to mod_php or something 
similar, feel free to tell me!  I'm running Apache2, suexec + chroot 
patch, php 4.4.1... the performance problem is that php eats up CPU, and 
when a script is requested X times very quickly, it means to a LOT of 
CPU time being consumed, it's horribly inefficient right now.
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