From: Ben Mansell <joosters@php.net>
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 14:03:48 +0000 (+0000)
Subject: Improved documentation for FastCGI SAPI. Documents the environment
X-Git-Tag: help~82
X-Git-Url: https://granicus.if.org/sourcecode?a=commitdiff_plain;h=8154dbb7a229f553ebf83723bb0608d35e147ae3;p=php

Improved documentation for FastCGI SAPI. Documents the environment
variable tunings and the new command line usage.
---

diff --git a/sapi/fastcgi/README.FastCGI b/sapi/fastcgi/README.FastCGI
index 65dbc44ea0..f0c4af718f 100644
--- a/sapi/fastcgi/README.FastCGI
+++ b/sapi/fastcgi/README.FastCGI
@@ -15,3 +15,77 @@ that is then required is to configure PHP with the '--with-fastcgi' option.
 After making the code, you will end up with a binary file called 'php'.
 Installation of this file will depend on the web server being used, please
 see their documentation for details.
+
+
+
+Running the FastCGI PHP module
+------------------------------
+
+There are two ways to run the resulting 'php' binary after the fastcgi
+version has been built:
+
+1) Configure your web server to run the PHP binary itself.
+
+This is the simplest method, obviously you will have to configure your
+web server appropriately. Some web servers may also not support this method,
+or may not be as efficient.
+
+2) Run PHP separately from the web server.
+
+In this setup, PHP is started as a separate process entirely from the web
+server. It will listen on a socket for new FastCGI requests, and deliver
+PHP pages as appropriate. This is the recommended way of running PHP-FastCGI.
+To run this way, you must start the PHP binary running by giving it a port
+number to listen to on the command line, e.g.:
+
+./php 8002
+
+(you can also specify a bind address, e.g. ./php localhost:8002. However, this
+ relies on the FastCGI devkit and does not seem to work properly)
+
+You must also configure your web server to connect to the appropriate port
+in order to talk to the PHP FastCGI process.
+
+The advantage of running PHP in this way is that it entirely separates the
+web server and PHP process, so that one cannot disrupt the other. It also
+allows PHP to be on an entirely separate machine from the web server if need
+be, you could even have several web servers utilising the same running PHP
+process if required!
+
+
+Security
+--------
+
+Be sure to run the php binary as an appropriate userid. Also, firewall out
+the port that PHP is listening on. In addition, you can set the environment
+variable FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS to control who can connect to the FastCGI.
+Set it to a comma separated list of IP addresses, e.g.:
+
+export FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS=199.170.183.28,199.170.183.71
+
+
+Tuning
+------
+
+There are a few tuning parameters that can be tweaked to control the
+performance of FastCGI PHP. The following are environment variables that can
+be set before running the PHP binary:
+
+PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN  (default value: 8)
+
+This controls how many child processes the PHP process spawns. When the
+fastcgi starts, it creates a number of child processes which handle one
+page request at a time. So by default, you will be able to handle 8
+concurrent PHP page requests. Further requests will be queued.
+Increasing this number will allow for better concurrency, especially if you
+have pages that take a significant time to create, or supply a lot of data
+(e.g. downloading huge files via PHP). On the other hand, having more
+processes running will use more RAM, and letting too many PHP pages be
+generated concurrently will mean that each request will be slow.
+
+PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS (default value: 500)
+
+This controls how many requests each child process will handle before
+exitting. When one process exits, another will be created. This tuning is
+necessary because several PHP functions are known to have memory leaks. If the
+PHP processes were left around forever, they would be become very inefficient.