We’re cur­rently in the pro­cess of tran­si­tio­ning our web ser­vers from NetBSD to Dra­gon­flyBSD; along with that, we’re also swit­ching our PHP plat­form to php-fpm. There are a few les­sons we lear­ned in the process.

First: At least on Dra­gon­flyBSD 2.10, apache2 does not at all per­form well as apache-mpm-worker. Swit­ching to apache-mpm-prefork chan­ged our CPU load from 98% of apa­che to about 3 – 5% of apache.

Also, php-fpm was deli­ve­r­ing too high a rate of 500 errors; this was not accep­ta­ble to our cust­o­mers. Inves­ti­ga­ti­ons into that lead me to the blog arti­cle at http://​alexca​bal​.com/​i​n​s​t​a​l​l​i​n​g​-​a​p​a​c​h​e​-​m​o​d​_​f​a​s​t​c​g​i​-​p​h​p​-​f​p​m​-​o​n​-​u​b​u​n​t​u​-​s​e​r​v​e​r​-​m​a​v​e​r​i​c​k​/​#​c​o​m​m​e​nts, which then sent me link-chasing to – ulti­mately – http://​arti​cle​.gmane​.org/​g​m​a​n​e​.​c​o​m​p​.​w​e​b​.​f​a​s​t​c​g​i​.​d​e​v​e​l​/​2​514. This means we now have a set of local patches to our pkgsrc tree that incor­po­rate the patch from this pos­ting. At first sight, this seems to have impro­ved the situation.