Here at Nexcess we’re always on the lookout for ways of improving our technology stack for our clients. This means making things like Varnish or Memcached, which can improve application performance tremendously, to be easy to deploy and manage on clients’ sites without negative side-effects. Lately, PHP-FPM has been one of the prime focuses of our attention as it combines the best of both suPHP and mod_php execution models to provide exceptional speed and security to PHP sites.
We’re now excited to announce that our work on PHP-FPM has paid off. We are able to use PHP-FPM/Apache to reduce our several current web stack variants down to just two, while still improving performance and security across the board. PHP-FPM also works flawlessly with Magento and other common PHP applications.
Going forward, we will be deploying PHP-FPM/Apache on the new servers for nearly all of our plans, replacing mod_php/Apache, suPHP/Apache, and PHP-LS/Litespeed. In our testing, PHP-FPM/Apache outperforms them by roughly 5%, 30%, and 5%, respectively. We are still working out details on applying PHP-FPM on currently existing servers so existing accounts will not see any change yet but we will be sure to announce it once we have more information in that regard.
