Monitoring PHP and Performance Tuning

opcache-php-process-flow

The next part of the series is, Monitoring PHP and Performance Tuning

PHP is a scripting language, which is interpreted by PHP interpreter.

You may be running a PHP file either directly using PHP Interpreter [Command line]

Or By A mediator, who is telling PHP Interpreter to execute the code. This means in the case of apahce HTTP server,

  • running PHP as module
  • running PHP as cgi/fastcgi
  • running PHP as fpm

You can only run one version of PHP as a module. If you are running multiple version of PHP, then you can achieve that by running PHP as FPM [Fast process manager]

Monitoring PHP running as FPM

  • FPM is a process manager, which runs PHP process in the background.
  • Same as the apache process and threads, it also manages threads whose numbers can be configured.
  • all configuration related values are defined in www.conf file, generally located in /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf

How to get the status ?

to get the status you need to modify www.conf

pm.status_path = /status

and add the code in one of the virtual host or apache conf file

<LocationMatch "/status">
    SetHandler "proxy:unix:/run/php-fpm/www.sock|fcgi://localhost/status"
</LocationMatch>

try to access it from a public URL or command line through curl

WARNING: - These must NOT be publicly accessible as this is a security risk.
<webhost>/status?html&full

You will get the information like this.

pidthe PID of the process
statethe state of the process (Idle, Running, …)
start timethe date and time the process has started
start sincethe number of seconds since the process has started
requeststhe number of requests the process has served
request durationthe duration in µs [micro seconds] of the requests
request methodthe request method (GET, POST, …)
request URIthe request URI with the query string
content lengththe content length of the request (only with POST)
userthe user (PHP_AUTH_USER) (or ‘-‘ if not set)
scriptthe main script called (or ‘-‘ if not set)
last request cputhe %cpu the last request consumed. it’s always 0 if the process is not in Idle state because CPU calculation is done when the request processing has terminated
last request memorythe max amount of memory the last request consumed. it’s always 0 if the process is not in Idle state because memory calculation is done when the request processing has terminated

How to enable slow logs ?

You can also enable access logs and slow logs. [slow logs mean script taking more than the desired time to execute]. This value can also be set

access.log = log/$pool.access.log
access.format = "%R - %u %t \"%m %r%Q%q\" %s %f %{mili}d %{kilo}M %C%%"
slowlog = /var/log/php-fpm/www-slow.log
request_slowlog_timeout = 20s ; script taking more than 20 seconds

As you can monitor this, now we come to the part where we can do the optimization.

Optimization

Optimizing php-fpm configuration

pm.max_children = 80
pm.start_servers = 8
pm.min_spare_servers = 5
pm.max_spare_servers = 35
pm.max_requests = 500

The above value defines the number of processes running PHP scripts. This can be modified on basis of your hardware resources availbility.

REMEMBER : PHP page is handled by FPM , apart from that, any static and HTML page, or the files does not have .PHP [defined extension to handle] can be directly server by webserver.

So setting Apache conifguration is differnet compare to PHP-FPM configuration

for more php-fpm conifguration
https://www.php.net/manual/en/install.fpm.configuration.php

Apart from this,

Caching Compiled Byte Code

PHP performance can be improved by storing precompiled script bytecode in shared memory, thereby removing the need for PHP to load and parse scripts on each request.

you can monitor the cache usage by a GUI

https://github.com/PeeHaa/OpCacheGUI

The following article provides a detailed description among different available PHP accelerator

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PHP_accelerators

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