I was originally going to write a blog post about why NginX with FastCGI was faster than Apache with mod_php. I had heard a while ago that NginX running PHP via FastCGI was faster than Apache with mod_php and have heard people swear up and down that it was true. I did a quick test on it a while back and found some corresponding evidence. Today I wanted to examine it more in depth and see if I could get some good numbers on why this was the case. The problem was that I couldn't.

He uses a "hello world" script as a baseline to do some testing and the ab to run the numbers. His results show a pretty significant difference between the two setups and an "strace" on Apache showed a clear "winner" as to why it's slower (reading the .htaccess file). Once he turned this off, though, Apache jumped up and started performing better than Nginx.

This all makes sense. mod_php has PHP embedded in Apache and so it should be faster. If you're running only PHP on a web server then Apache still seems to be your best bet for performance. And if you are seeing a significant performance difference then you should check if AllowOverride is turned on. If it is, try moving that into httpd.conf and try again.

I installed Zend Server some time ago, so I'm still on a PHP 5.2 mod_php binary. I have several PHP 5.3 binaries compiled and installed locally for running unit tests and sample scripts already -- so the question was how to keep my 5.2 mod_php running while simultaneously allowing the ability to run selected vhosts in 5.3? The answer can be summed up in one acronym: FastCGI.

He shows how to enable FastCGI in Apache (on Ubuntu), make a virtual host for your site and create a "cgi-bin" directory to contain the script(s) for your PHP versions as CGIs.