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To: internals@lists.php.net,steve roussey <iamstever@gmail.com>
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Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2005 21:44:32 +0200
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Subject: Re: Moving to PHP5.1 and Apache 2.2 next year, need help
From: akorthaus@web.de (Andreas Korthaus)

steve roussey wrote:

  > The setup we are striving for is to keep connections open all the way
> down the chain to the database. Ideally this would mean that we would
> use Apache 2.2 with the event MPM to hold user connections. Then the
> PHP threads would ideally hold persistent connections to the databases
> (either through using the Apache 2.1 mod_dbd or doing it in PHP
> itself).

Have you considered using lighttpd with fastcgi loadbalancing and 
caching using mod_cml (cache meta language)?

We have a similar problem here, and that's how we're going to solve it:

By using lighttpd with fastcgi we seperate the webserver process from 
php processes (which could even work on other machines) which saves a 
lot of resources (memory/cpu/load) and enhance response-time for static 
files.

For simple dynamic requests we can use mod_cml, which can "communicate" 
with PHP using memcached or the filesystem. Only if mod_cml cannot 
response to the request using cached data, php is needed. That speeds 
things up a lot, since cache-hits in mod_cml are not much slower than 
static files (because php is not touched in any way).

It works perfectly with keep-alive.

The connections from lighttpd process to fastcgi php processes are also 
persistent. It's no problem to use a php opcode cache. Perhaps 
db-connection pooling isn't an issue anymore, because the number of 
php-processes (= number of db connections) can be reduced drastically. 
Perhaps you can use apc_store()... or memcached to cache results of DB 
queries.

http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/wiki/CacheMetaLanguage
http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/wiki/TutorialLighttpdAndPHP
http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/wiki/MigratingFromApache


However, I don't think mod_php on a threaded webserver is a good idea, 
least of all for a setup under high load because of the arguments 
already mentioned in this thread and because most developers don't use 
threaded setups today.


best regards,
Andreas