Re: fastcgi opening pages - very slow

root-bJTsZiUCoz/[email protected] wrote:
> hello
>  
> i have debian lenny 64bit lenny server with intel quadcore cpu and 4gb 
> ram (fastcgi 2.4.6). i have about 1.4 tb traffic month on this server. 
> my problem is the speed of fastcgi applikation. when i want the visit 
> one website on my server somethimes i must wait about 5 seconds the view 
> the site. after them the speed is better. you can try the visit these 
> sites and you will see somethimes you must wait some seconds the view 
> the site:
> http://www.ally-tera.de or http://www.board2null.de . when i restart the 
> webserver everything ist going very fast for 30 minutes. after them the 
> speed ist very bad again. please help me to solve the problem. is my 
> configuration bad? i have many visitors per day: about 5000.... 

Hi -

I reported something similar before (see below) but I never get rid of 
the problem.

A far as I understood, fastcgi always tries to connect to a php-cgi 
process even if that said-process is no longer loaded (aka was killed by 
fastcgi). In this situation, fastcgi keep tries to join a non-existing 
process until timeout is reached. After that only it does respawn a new 
process which takes several seconds indeed due to the timeout. I think 
that when a previously-spawned process is killed for some reasons, 
fastcgi should not leave any trace of it in order to respawn a new one 
as soon as possible when required. I started to deal with that problem 
but I never find enough time to spend entering my brain in the source code!

I'm not sure that I helped you so much, except that now you know you are 
not alone to face this problem! :)

Best regards,

Olivier Le Cam

-- Copy of email sent on Nov 11, 2008 --

Setup based on Apache (2.2.3-4+etch5) + libapache2-mod-fastcgi (2.4.2-8) 
+  php5-cgi (5.2.6-0.dotdeb.1)

Everything is working fine with this setup except for an abnormal long 
delay for spawning a new php5-cgi through suexec for the second time 
(after the first one has been killed).

Way to repeat the problem:

1. Apache just (re)started
2. Access to a virtualhost, say http://test.mydomain.com
     This takes approx. 0.5s which is fine
2. Access to this site again
     This takes approx. 0.04s which is still fine
3. Wait that the spawned process php5-cgi for this virtualhost is killed 
by fcgi-pm. Then access to the site again. Now it takes more than 3s to 
get the php5-cgi spawned. After that, time access is back to normal 
(~0.04s) untill the process is killed (then the 3s delay come back for 
the next spawn).

I have this in my Apache conf:

FastCgiWrapper /usr/local/lib/apache2/suexec-fcgi
FastCgiConfig -minProcesses 0 -maxClassProcesses 1 -maxProcesses 300 \
     -processSlack 30 -singleThreshold 20 -killInterval 240
AddHandler php5-fastcgi .php .php3 .php4 .php5
<Location /cgi-bin/php5-fcgi>
     SetHandler fastcgi-script
     Options +ExecCGI
</Location>
Action php5-fastcgi /cgi-bin/php5-fcgi
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php5

And this is the cgi-bin/php5-fcgi wrapper:
#!/bin/sh
export PHPRC="/web/s/t/test/php-configs/php5/"
export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=0
export PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=1000
exec /usr/bin/php5-cgi

I spends some time attaching strace to fcgi-pm and Apache process, but I 
sadly didn't get a chance to figure out what could be the problem.

Does this sound to someone?

Any help/hint/idea will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in anticipation!