Re: Processes dying prematurely

On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 08:54:42AM -0400, Ben Chabot wrote:
> I may have simply set this up incorrectly.  Should I be calling something
> else?  Is there a php-pm application somewhere that calls these workers? 
> Or is php with --enable-fastcgi supposed to spawn workers on it's own?

PHP has two modes in its FastCGI implementation. One has a
manager process which manages a set of child processes,
all accepting and processing connections; those child
processes then parse and run the actual PHP code. The
other mode runs the interpreter in a single process. My
experience is that the former mode is much more reliable
than the latter; if you want mod_fastcgi or another
process manager to manage the PHP processes, then set
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN to 1.

The default *used* to be PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=8 (and this is
still what the documentation says) but at some point it
was actually changed to 0, which enables the
single-process mode (the second one described above).

If you're starting PHP through some other mechanism, e.g.
as an external server, then you may as well set
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN to some reasonable value and leave it to
manage itself. That will save you some memory because of
copy-on-write (though not much probably).

-- 
``Our fear of terrorists, it seems, is exceeded only by
  our desire to watch them on television.'' (Jonathan Shainin)
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