Letting Lighttpd spawn php processes

To configure Lighttpd to connect to php and spawn fastcgi processes, edit lighttpd.conf. Sockets are preferred to connect to fastcgi processes on the local system.

server.modules += ( "mod_fastcgi" )

fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>
  ((
    "socket" => "/tmp/php.socket",
    "bin-path" => "/usr/local/bin/php-cgi",
    "bin-environment" => (
      "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "16",
      "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "10000"
    ),
    "min-procs" => 1,
    "max-procs" => 1,
    "idle-timeout" => 20
  ))
)

The bin-path directive allows lighttpd to spawn fastcgi processes dynamically. PHP will spawn children according to the PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN environment variable. The "bin-environment" directive sets the environment for the spawned processes. PHP will kill a child process after the number of requests specified by PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS is reached. The directives "min-procs" and "max-procs" should generally be avoided with PHP. PHP manages its own children and opcode caches like APC will only share among children managed by PHP. If "min-procs" is set to something greater than 1, the total number of php responders will be multiplied PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN (2 min-procs * 16 children gives 32 responders).

Spawning with spawn-fcgi

Lighttpd provides a program called spawn-fcgi to make the process of spawning fastcgi processes easier.

Spawning php-cgi

It is possible to spawn processes without spawn-fcgi, though a bit of heavy-lifting is required. Setting the PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN environment var controls how many children PHP will spawn to handle incoming requests. Setting PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS will determine how long (in requests) each child will live. Here's a simple bash script to help spawn php responders.

#!/bin/sh

# Location of the php-cgi binary
PHP=/usr/local/bin/php-cgi

# PID File location
PHP_PID=/tmp/php.pid

# Binding to an address
#FCGI_BIND_ADDRESS=10.0.1.1:10000
# Binding to a domain socket
FCGI_BIND_ADDRESS=/tmp/php.sock

PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=16
PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=10000

env -i PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=$PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN \
       PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=$PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS \
       $PHP -b $FCGI_BIND_ADDRESS &

echo $! > "$PHP_PID"

Connecting to remote FCGI instances

Fastcgi instances can be spawned on multiple remote machines in order to scale applications.

fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>
   (( "host" => "10.0.0.2", "port" => 1030 ),
    ( "host" => "10.0.0.3", "port" => 1030 ))
)