Installing apache, fastcgi & php-fpm on dragonflybsd

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://alexcabal.com/installing-apache-mod_fastcgi-php-fpm-on-ubuntu-server-maverick/#comments, which then sent me link-cha­sing to – ulti­m­ate­ly – http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.fastcgi.devel/2514. 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.