Best PHP-FPM Configuration?

[kgs]

Howdy!

Now that cPanel is defaulting to PHP-FPM enabled for new accounts, this seemed like a good time to ask:

We used to run our WordPress sites with PHP-FPM, but did not see positive results. If we left it with default settings (Max Requests, Process Idle Timeout, Max Children), the sites would barely run—timing out often with barely any traffic. If we increased the settings, the processes would linger for a really long time in the Process Manager, and, as a result, we would see significantly higher memory usage on the server—often to the point of severely negatively impacting performance server-wide.

With our last configuration, we tried to strike a balance with Max Requests, Process Idle Timeout and Max Children at 300, 100, and 200 respectively. But, ultimately, we just turned PHP-FPM off, and have been running suphp. This dealt with the server memory and timeout problems, but the site seems slower than on PHP-FPM.

Our server is a 6 GB, 48 processor Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2670 v3 @ 2.30GHz VPS. We're running PHP 7.4 and MySQL 5.7.

Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[cPRex]

Hey there! You may have seen me say something similar in other threads in the past about there never being a "best" but it's all about what your server's needs are. In this case, it would be good to identify the bottleneck that is keeping the sites from running properly - is it RAM usage on the PHP processes or the number of requests coming in? Knowing that would help you choose the best settings for sure, but ultimately my best recommendation would be to work with a developer experienced in PHP-FPM as the defaults do work well for a large number of users, so it's possible your sites or other configuration just need deeper fine tuning.