[Cialug] Apache2 + PHP MPMs

[David Champion]

Jonathan Bailey wrote:
> Has anyone had any experience with Apache2 and a threaded MPM like perchild
> or worker with PHP4? I switched a development from prefork to worker and
> noticed a huge improvement in speed. It this worth it or are there unforseen
> stability issues? Also, is PHP5 any better stability-wise in this respect?

I have been running Apache 2.0 prefork (The Mandriva ADVX version) and 
PHP4 for well over a year in production with no stability issues.

The benchmarks I've done on dynamic PHP / MySQL sites comparing Apache 
1.x and 2.0 show that 2.0 is a bit faster - like maybe 10%.

I have not tried threaded mode, for the reasons stated in Jerry's link. 
I've heard that those claims are a little over-blown, but it would be 
nice to know specifically what PHP modules and libriaries are 
thread-safe and which aren't.

As far as PHP5 stability goes, it shouldn't be any more or less 
thread-safe than PHP4... it's not PHP that's the problem, it's add-on 
modules and libraries. If I had to guess, I'd say PHP5 might be a little 
less stable since it's so new, but it was in beta for a long time, so 
maybe they got the bugs worked out pretty well.

-dc