My hosts PHP choices, which is best?
 

My hosts PHP choices, which is best? Or which should I use and what do i have to do to anything else in preparation for upgrade to 4.2.2 ?



PHP 5.2
All files with the extension .php will be handled by the PHP 5.2 engine.
Legacy PHP with security updates. Compatible with most environments.
PHP 5.2 (Single php.ini)
Same as PHP 5.2, but all subdirectories will use ~/public_html/php.ini

PHP 5.2 (FastCGI)
All files with the extension .php will be handled by PHP 5.2 FastCGI processes.
FastCGI for PHP makes all your PHP applications run through mod_fastcgi instead of mod_suphp. This eliminates the overhead of loading the PHP interpreter on every hit. Since it is always in memory ready for the next hit, the responses will be generated faster.
PHP 5.3
All files with the extension .php will be handled by the PHP 5.3 engine.
Most reliable and compatible version of PHP.

PHP 5.3 (Single php.ini)
Same as PHP 5.3, but all subdirectories will use ~/public_html/php.ini

PHP 5.4
All files with the extension .php will be handled by the PHP 5.4 engine.
Latest version of PHP.

PHP 5.4 (Single php.ini)
Same as PHP 5.4, but all subdirectories will use ~/public_html/php.ini

PHP 5.4 (FastCGI)
All files with the extension .php will be handled by PHP 5.4 FastCGI processes.
FastCGI for PHP makes all your PHP applications run through mod_fastcgi instead of mod_suphp. This eliminates the overhead of loading the PHP interpreter on every hit. Since it is always in memory ready for the next hit, the responses will be generated faster.

php 5.4 is the obvious choice for vb 4.2.2 as thats what the version is for. By the way 5.4 is not the latest version 5.5 is already available in cpanel.

Using PHP 5.5 will cause a few deprecated errors to show up though, as one of the changes was to make the /e modifier for preg_replace deprecated. vB uses this in a few places. I believe most of them were fixed in 4.2.2, but I've caught a couple instances still occurring in my error logs (though 4.2.2 vastly reduced the error spew from vB to the logs on 5.4 and 5.5).

If you use vBSEO, you'll get even more errors from running PHP 5.5 (I've fixed at least 6 different locations by now in my own installation from that, but there's one in the configuration area that I've not been able to fix without having the configuration get blanked out).

TL;DR version, stick with PHP 5.4 for now, unless you have a need for 5.5.

PHP 5.4 (Single php.ini) or PHP 5.4 (FastCGI) ?

I really don't know the difference as I don't even know what PHP does.

A web page (i.e. html, xhtml) is just static, but a browser only knows how to display html. So for content that is dynamic, such as forums, you need some method of converting that dynamic content into the static output required by a browser. PHP is one method of converting dynamic content into a static page that can be displayed by the browser. The different versions specified are different setups for being able to interpret php on the server to generate the webpage that will be displayed to the end user. In most cases you'll want the FastCGI as this will improve the performance of your site unless there's something in the default php.ini your host is giving you that you need to override that you can't do with .htaccess.

So if I choose the FastCGI I may get errors? What can I look for in the php.ini to determine if that's going to happen?

--------------- Added [DATE]1382057238[/DATE] at [TIME]1382057238[/TIME] ---------------

I chose the first 5.4 option and I get the following now:

Warning: Non-static method VBSHOUT_CACHE::init() should not be called statically in ..../dbtech/vbshout/hooks/global_start.php on line 26