What's your tips or your official opinion about Mod Ruid2 ?

[Silent Ninja]

I've been reading this FAQ post... Apache PHP Request Handling ... where you talk about all the PHP options we can use with cPanel.

I know that mod_ruid2 is a new module that allow us to basically use the Apache DSO-PHP with suExec; but since it's listed as "experimental" I'm not so confident on using it on a production webserver, but still, I'd like to know if you -at least- recommend us to try it on some non-critical servers, since I've heard that it's almost as good in speed and memory usage as the DSO module, but I haven't seen any side to side comparisson or official "benchmark like" tables to see if it's really worth a try in exchange with suPHP or FastCGI which also provides with suExec-ish features.

To make it short I'd like to know if you can give us official insight about it... do you recommend it? Do you know if it's secure? Are there some known issues that we should be aware of?

[srpurdy]

My Opinion with limited testing. That Fast-Cgi is almost useless now with this module. I think the only advantage fast-cgi has now is you can use worker instead of prefork. But speed wise mod_ruid2 is the best.

However I do have more security concerns with mod_ruid2 right now vs suPHP. Although if configured right mod_ruid2 can be more secure. I think the project itself is still new and I think things will improve over time. Personally I feel like it's a bit too soon. But I think over time this module will be the normal module to use. For me this is a good thing, because I don't really like fast-cgi in terms of it's problems with handling php processes. It becomes very complicated in a shared environment to get the most out of it. This is why I use suPHP. mod_ruid2 eliminates that problem for the most part. So as long as you have the memory to spare it's a good option. suPHP is really slow in comparison to either of these two, but gives much more stability then fast-cgi, and is also perfect for small memory servers. (vps) I think for that suPHP is always going to be the better option as it's likely if you overuse cpu and disk i/o you would have enough traffic to afford upgrading. So I'd like more speed too. So I'm keeping a close eye on mod_ruid2.

I know it's not maybe useful to you as you probably know all this, but in terms of performance mod_ruid2 is faster than both suPHP and fast-cgi so if your interested for that reason alone than it's a good option. Personally I rather wait a bit more until It's not a beta module, but I see no reason why you shouldn't test it and play with it on a non production server.

[cPanelTristan]

The only real issue I've seen in conjunction with mod_ruid2 is that there are some issues with mod_security. This has been discussed on this forum and on the mod_security forum site (just do a google search for mod_ruid2 mod_security and you should be able to find relevant discussions).

Otherwise, I'm unsure of the security issues being mentioned compared to suPHP. It runs processes (all processes) that are forked as the user of the process, including HTML pages and images. This means you can track down the user for all Apache processes causing an issue. Under suPHP, you can only do that for PHP.