Today I have been really struggling setting up PHP with FastCGI on my Apache 2.2.

I already had a Apache 2.2 with Prefork MPM running using mod_php5 and thought: Oh well lets “just” replace the prefork with worker to see how it performs. I knew that I would have to configure FastCGI for that as well, but there were plenty of instructions on the web, so I gave it a try.

But I ended up with a downtime of 2 hours with no success. All the instructions I found had one or another problem. I got confused with FastCGI, fcgid and tons of vhosts stuff, was frustrated and about to give up.

Then I found this fantastic instructions from Typo3. Here Linux can shine again. If you do it right you can do it fast, without hassle and without interruption of service. Also Kudos to Michael Stucki for writing this up. The instructions work flawlessly.

I did this on a live system with users using it. Noone of the users noticed this successful migration.

I am very pleased with the way its working now. Cut memory consumption and response times by over 50% without any hassle (well at least if i would have had the instructions before my first attempt :-) )

Now I can work out how to tune fcgid and the worker MPM.