New VPS, Nginx and PHP-FPM

I bought a VPS share from GANDI yesterday. They are the cheapest I have found, $16/month (I must admit I haven’t searched much though). Here is a sentence about them from Wikipedia:

They do not pay for publicity, but rely on word-of-mouth only. Since 2008, they also provide virtual servers through Xen technology.

They are France based and I love having a server in France, very handy for proxying through Europe. After setting up fundamental software and services on my shiny Debian 5 OS, I decided to migrate my blog from Blogger to WordPress. I started by installing the classic LAMP stack, Apache, Mysql and PHP.

I bought a single share (means a single slice) which has 256 MB of memory, 5 GB disk (+ another 2.5 GB for system software) and 5 MBit/sec unlimited bandwidth. After setting up Apache with mod_php I was shocked to see that it would cost me 210 MBs of memory to host a single WordPress installation. I’ve used and setup Nginx for RubyOnRails and Python/Django setups before but never for PHP. I decided to give it a try.

After following the instructions on this page to setup Nginx with PHP-FPM (PHP Fastcgi Process Manager) using 2 threads to serve my blog, I was happy to see that the overall memory usage was 66 MB. Well of course I could lower the number of child processes in the Apache config but I don’t think it would lower memory usage this much and I am really fed up with Apache’s way of threading and process management.

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  • Hello, I am Fırat.

    I am a CS student from Turkey. I can't stop learning new things every day and rant about them!