On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 10:44 AM, howard chen <howachen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I was heard that wikipedia is running on
Apache/mod_php, are there any
reason not to use fast-cgi approach for performance (e.g. lighty /
ngnix + fast cgi?)
The reason that mod_php is slow is because you have to have an
instance of PHP running when much if not most of the time, Apache is
waiting to serve results to slow clients. This means that you have
many more instances of PHP than you actually need, which means much
more memory. In Wikipedia's case, however, Apache is serving data
exclusively to Squid, which is reading the data at least as fast as it
can write it. It wouldn't save anything to have FastCGI serve data to
lighttpd or nginx instead; it would be no faster than mod_php serving
it to Squid. So little to nothing would be saved by using FastCGI.