Pavel Shevaev has a quick new post to his blog showing how to get PHP-FPM to execute PHP scripts via a socket request.

We are using APC cache very heavily in our projects and during project deployment the cache must be flushed and warmed up. A common solution to warmup the APC cache is to fetch some special page via HTTP which does the job. The problem with this approach is that it's not reliable enough when PHP is served via several fastcgi back-ends.

To solve the problem, he uses a PHP-FPM module to work with the FastCGI socket and execute any file (as permissions allow, of course). In his case, he uses it to "warm up" his APC cache for the user. A code snippet is provided as an example.

Justin Carmony has a new tutorial posted to his blog today about setting up Nginx and PHP-FPM on Ubuntu in a few easy steps (thanks to some package management).

This is another wonderful setup that I've found myself using rather than the traditional Apache & mod_php setup. [...] Ngnix, unlike Apache, doesn't actually load PHP. Instead, it hands it off as a proxy to a "php handler" which acts like an Application Server. So nginx by itself won't serve PHP files, but just static files.

He briefly introduces Nginx and PHP-FPM for those not familiar and points out that this combination is very fast, even without much configuration. The packages are installed with the aptitude installer and minimal changes are made to the php-fm and nginx configuration files (mostly to set up whatever your domain/virtual host is).

New on the SitePoint PHP blog there's a tutorial combining WordPress and PHP-FPM/nginx to give you a high-performance version of your site.

In this tutorial, I'll show how to build a server capable of withstanding a front-page Digg placement, step by step. This will mean your business stays online when it's most important-when everyone is looking. We'll go through the process of building a super-fast, bulletproof custom web server for WordPress. The technology stack we'll use is Ubuntu, nginx, PHP-FPM, and MySQL. In a future article we'll look at adding memcached to the mix to take performance even further.

He walks you through the full install of each piece of software (on a linux-based system) even helping you compile PHP 5.3. There's some examples of configurations and a few shell commands you'll need to get things linked together and working, but the overall process is pretty quick and painless. Even if you already have a WordPress site, it's not too hard to follow along and drop it right in.

Mike Willbanks has written up an introductory guide to getting your own Nginx+PHP-FPM (a FastCGI process manager for PHP) server up and running.

[These technologies] offer a great solution for finally getting rid of that old sloppy mod_php in Apache. Do you have the same issue where your apache instances have started to run too large? This might be the time to start to move forward.

He talks about setting up the PHP-FPM instance with a custom compile, adding in an init script (from the fpm branch on the PHP svn), installing Nginx and configuring them both to work together. He also helps you set up a sample site (and virtualhost) that will run the PHP-FPM stuff on each request.

Because of a recent addition to the the Gentoo PHP package (FPM support) they're looking for people to test it out and report back the results. To help, Ole Markus has written up some instructions on how to get it up and working on your system with nginx.

PHP just added the FPM patch to their 5.3 branch, making it likely that PHP 5.3.3 will support the FPM SAPI. The FPM SAPI is an improved fcgi SAPI that allows for more advanced configuration than the original fcgi SAPI. One of the most useful features is process management, which makes it very useful for lightweight webservers, such as nginx, that does not handle process management of fcgi themselves.

There's only a few commands you'll need to get this new package installed and working with your local nginx install with the help of the emerge and layman tools. He also includes the configuration change you'll need to make to the nginx config file to get it working as a FastCGI module.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Louis Simoneau talks about something that can potentially make the PHP+ngnix combination even faster - the inclusion of the PHP-FPM patch into PHP's core.

You may be asking, "What is PHP-FPM, and why should I care?" PHP-FPM is a patch for PHP core that handles the starting, stopping, and restarting of FastCGI processes as needed. This is important because nginx can only interface with PHP via FastCGI, unlike Apache, which loads the whole PHP environment right into itself.

Right now, the only downside to setting up the FastCGI interface with nginx takes a bit more work than the normal mod_php Apache handles so well. The PHP-FPM patch helps with some of this by making the FastCGI support directly embedded into PHP, removing the need for a lot of external setup.

As Alexey Zakhlestins' mentions on his blog, the PHP-FPM project is now under the BSD license with the potential for it to be included in the main PHP distribution.

PHP-FPM is "deciphered" as "PHP FastCGI Process Manager" and is a patch for php to greatly improve FastCGI SAPI usage in production. It adds a bunch of additional features to php's fastcgi such as: easy php-process daemonization (with ability to specify uid/gid/chroot/log-file), safe php-processes restart (without losing requests), custom error-handling and accelerated file-upload support (requires additional support from web-server).

You can find out more about the project from its main site including a FAQ and documentation to get it up and running.