Comments on: FastCGI with a PHP APC Opcode Cache

By: Brandon

Brandon — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:41:31 +0000

@Christopher I haven't seen the error messages you're seeing, but you might have a look at pecl bug #16966.

By: Christopher

Christopher — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:20:40 +0000

Brandom, thanks for this detailed article. I’m wondering if you or anyone has experienced errors with apc? I’m currently getting the following almost continuously when apc is enabled: unable to allocate memory for pool

By: george

george — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:30:44 +0000

Thanks Brandon this is a brilliant article so clear and concise and easy to understand!

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:12:39 +0000

Thanks a lot for this tutorial !

I’ve lost some hours trying to figure why my apc cache was restarted every request (apc.php show me uptime 0 and the start time was always the current time.)

It was because I wrote “FastCgiConfig …” line after the line “FastCgiWrapper on” in the config …

Perhaps this tip will help some people

By: sina

sina — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:46:03 +0000

Excellent article Brandon, Thanks.
I can wait to read your next article about benchmarks

By: Brandon

Brandon — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:29:38 +0000

This is still the method I use. On some boxes I run the fastcgi php processes externally via a process watcher such as daemontools, but it’s still the same general idea.

Typical shared hosting providers oversell which would prohibit them from dedicating the ram needed to support opcode caches per user. I’m sure some companies are doing it, but I can’t imagine it will ever be the “norm”.

By: joshua

joshua — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:20:55 +0000

@Brandon I know this post was written a while ago. Do you have any updates to add or is this still the defacto method? Seems in 2010 this should have been figured out without jumping thru hoops. A shared hosting enviro should be secure and utilize a opcode. Hard to believe there is not an out of the box setup.

By: João Santana

João Santana — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:31:18 +0000

Thanks Brandon, was needing this for a small ubuntu server and it’s working as it should.

It’s worth to mention the fact that I learnt the hard-way (meaning pulling my hair out for a couple of hours) that the ScriptAlias directive on apache .conf had to be commented out in case it exists or else I was having a 404 error to an incorrect cgi path when i clicked on any .php file.

Thx again.

By: Jason Williams

Jason Williams — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 22:04:39 +0000

Hi Brandon,

Just wanted to echo the thanks of others here as I now have APC+FastCGI setup as you described, and it’s working a treat.

I had a few gotcha’s to contend with along the way as is only natural with different flavours of Linux. Now working great under Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Thanks again.

By: Brandon

Brandon — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:31:52 +0000

@John Hmm. Can you give an example of a file you are executing with a different owner? In this post I describe setting up a wrapper around php-cgi. This wrapper is executed by Apache's suEXEC. I describe the file ownership permissions for this wrapper, and if I deviate from these I get a 500 error response. Apache is configured to use the php-cgi wrapper to for all PHP files. In this configuration the wrapper is executed by suEXEC and the actual PHP file is read by php-cgi. This means that if the PHP file is readable by the suEXEC user it will execute, regardless of owner. If this isn't what you want, set the unix permissions of each PHP file accordingly. You mention that you can execute files with a different owner/group then what you define in SuexecUserGroup. I've tested this and cannot get this behavior on my system - which is why I ask, what files are you trying to execute?