php-cgi bad performance
 

Heya guys,

I wanted to use the nginx server application for my new webserver, because apache2 was totally unperformant.
(Im on AMD64 with debian etch)

I used this tutorial:
http://www.howtoforge.com/installing...debian-etch-p2

To setup nginx with fast-cgi.

I just setup a testserver to play a bit around.
Currently I'm experiencing a strange behaviour of the cgi processes.
Nginx is perfectly working.

But my php-cgi processes are going mad:


PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
15100 www-data 20 0 235m 17m 3076 R 46 0.6 0:51.55 php-cgi
15097 www-data 20 0 235m 17m 3076 R 44 0.6 0:57.14 php-cgi
15099 www-data 20 0 233m 15m 3076 R 40 0.5 0:51.38 php-cgi
15134 www-data 20 0 232m 14m 3076 S 36 0.5 0:49.13 php-cgi
15098 www-data 20 0 232m 14m 3076 S 28 0.5 0:55.42 php-cgi

My php-cgi cpu usage is always around 40-50% even if I'm not accessing the site.
When I relaunch the cgi processes they are at 0%, but with each request the cpu usage is growing.

I can leave the site 10minutes idle, but the cpu usage won't go down.

Any tips what I can do about this?
Thanks in advance, and sorry for my bad englisch.

There is a thread over at vB.com about nginx.

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=253741

switch to php-fpm the thread on vb.com will help

I use spawn-fcgi from lighttpd to spawn php processes for nginx. I would suggest using it or php-fpm at the very least.

You should check the error.log and check what exactly is causing the issue with the cgi process.

Most likely you have something hanging up the process.

tail the error log

I got some serious errors with spawn-fcgi after a time.
I recommend using php-fpm.
http://php-fpm.anight.org/
It's working fine for about a year now.
you need to patch and recompile php but it is worth it.
I also recommend using suhosin:
http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/