On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Rahul S. Johari <sleepwalker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> On 9/15/09 10:54 AM, "Andres Gonzalez" <andres@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >>> >> I have an application developed that uses alot of PHP. Currently, it is >> running on a Ubuntu 8.04 , single core CPU host. We are moving to a >> quad core host for this application. >> >> Is there anything special that I need to do to configure PHP to run on a >> quad core host? I noticed that my current single core system has PHP >> configured with Thread Safety disabled (as reported from phpinfo()). >> Does that need to be enabled to run in a multi-core environment? >> >> Any other suggestions for configuring PHP for multi-core use? > > > Very interesting question indeed; > > I moved from a single-core to dual-core some time back, and recently moved > from dual-core to quad-core. Never paid attention to the hyper-threading > difference in the httpd process. Would definitely be interesting in seeing > more information on this topic. > > --- > Rahul Sitaram Johari > Founder, Internet Architects Group, Inc. > > [Email] sleepwalker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > [Web] http://www.rahulsjohari.com > > > > > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > In regards to thread-safe compilations of PHP, if you don't absolutely know you need it, you don't need it. Utilizing a multiple CPU server setup with PHP depends on how you're using PHP. If you're using FastCGI with a process pool, the number of PHP processes is going to determine how many CPUs PHP uses, obviously enough. On a quad core machine, 2 FastCGI children in the pool are only ever going to use 2 cores, while 4 processes has a higher likelihood of utilizing the entire set of CPUs. However, setting your child process number too low can seriously impede your performance, so there's some experimentation necessary to determine what's best for your particular scenario, based on usage, server power, script profiling, etc. but a good number to start with is (1.5 * # of logical processors). All of this necessarily changes if you're using Apache, of course. Under the classic pre-fork model, Apache forks a new process to handle a request every time the server is hit. So, to utilize four cores, Apache would have to serve four pages simultaneously, forking four child processes. Depending on your traffic and page generation time, the amount of child Apache processes can pretty easily head up into the hundreds, unless of course you have a lower MaxChildren set (which I personally would recommend against because of Apache's huge glaring vulnerability to SlowLoris). Under the worker model, Apache forks up to X processes, and each process handles a configurable amount of requests before dying, so like FastCGI, you'd have to configure the number of children to be run, although it's recommended (I hear, I'm not too very familiar with Apache) to use a much higher number than the amount of cores, several dozen perhaps. Like I said, I'm not too familiar with Apache, so I'd do some research and experimentation with the number of child workers to give Apache. I hope this helps :) -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
