[ILUG] Apache 2 and PHP

[Niall O Broin]

On Sunday 14 March 2004, njo at sig11.com (Niall James O'Higgins) wrote:

>My experience, on a pretty high traffic site:
>
>Threaded Apache2 + PHP = bad news.
>
>Constantly coring if anyone had a badly written script, impossible to
>debug, etc.

That's interesting to hear - confirmation from the trenches, so to speak.

>My advice would be stay away from Apache2 threaded MPM combined with
>PHP4. I think PHP5 might be better able to guarantee thread-safe-ness.

I'll definitely be following that advice. But I don't know if PHP5 CAN make
that much of a difference TBH, given the problems. Even if the core language
itself is better designed from the POV of thread safety, there's still the
issue of other modules. Of course, you shouldn't be running code which you
don't know works well . . .

>If apache 1.3x gives you adequate performance, stick with that. If you
>need apache2 features, try it in traditional MPM mode.

I don't currently need any Apache 2 features. However, I'm about to deploy
some new servers and there's going to be a lot of cleaning up done of
operating procedures on said servers, and I was thinking that it would be a
good idea to use Apache 2 from the start of service of these boxes. Of course,
another perfectly valid approach is to go with what you know works :-)


Niall