wiredfool

According to the lightroom docs, if you are using a config like this:

  fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>
      (( "socket" => "/tmp/php-fastcgi.socket",
          "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi",
          "max-procs" => 10,
          "bin-environment" => (
              "PHP\_FCGI\_CHILDREN" => "16",
              "PHP\_FCGI\_MAX\_REQUESTS" => "1000" 
          ),
          "broken-scriptfilename" => "enable" 
      ))
  )

you will have (following the famous formula):

num-procs = max-procs * ( 1 + PHP\_FCGI\_CHILDREN ) 
10 * (16 + 1) = 170 procs

This is perhaps not what you want, especially since the php instances will slowly increase their memory high water marks and not release memory until they will generally all have processed your most memory intensive script, at which point you will have probably run out of memory in a manner similar to what apache will usually do for you out of the box.

If you’re using an opcode cache, you want one process, to allow one cache to be shared amongst all the child processes. (apparently, according to the google. I’m checking now). If you do have php children set, you don’t want 1, as that will have one controlling process and one child process, for a nice waste of space. My impression is that you want either max processes = 1 or max children = 1, and let the other float such that processes * max memory is less than your ram.