What is the difference between fastcgi and fpm?

Question

I am trying to install php with fpm on macports. I read somewhere that fpm means FastCGI process manager. Does that mean fastcgi and fpm are same? If they are same, then why

Answer 1

What Anthony says is absolutely correct, but I'd like to add that your experience will likely show a lot better performance and efficiency (due not to fpm-vs-fcgi but more to the implementation of your httpd).

For example, I had a quad-core machine running lighttpd + fcgi humming along nicely. I upgraded to a 16-core machine to cope with growth, and two things exploded: RAM usage, and segfaults. I found myself restarting lighttpd every 30 minutes to keep the website up.

I switched to php-fpm and nginx, and RAM usage dropped from >20GB to 2GB. Segfaults disappeared as well. After doing some research, I learned that lighttpd and fcgi don't get along well on multi-core machines under load, and also have memory leak issues in certain instances.

Is this due to php-fpm being better than fcgi? Not entirely, but how you hook into php-fpm seems to be a whole heckuva lot more efficient than how you serve via fcgi.