Boost your website by running
PHP on Nginx
Tips and tricks for high performance websites
Harald Zeitlhofer @HZeitlhofer
harald.zeitlhofer@dynatrace.com

Harald Zeitlhofer
• Technology Strategist at Dynatrace
• Database and Web Development
• Love to discover new things

Tips and tricks for high performance websites

Once upon a time...
performance matters !!!

performance matters !!!

performance matters !!!

Modern Web Pages: lots of static content
434 Resources in total on that page:
230 JPEGs, 75 PNGs, 50 GIFs, …
more than 20MB page size

Fifa.com during Worldcup 2014
http://blog.dynatrace.com/2014/05/21/is-the-fifa-world-cup-website-ready-for-the-tournament/
largest item on page:
favicon.ico with 370 KB!!!
but also some heavyweight
CSS and JS files with up to 288 KB!!!

• Expires
• Last-Modified
• Etag
• Cache-Control

cached content
can still create roundtrips
to the network!

Web Request handling

Web Request handling

PHP-FPM
FastCGI Process Manager
Available since 5.3.3
Stable since 5.4.1

PHP-FPM
• Installation
• Pool configuration
/etc/php/7.0/fpm/pool.d/www.conf
[www]
user = www-data
group = www-data
listen = 127.0.0.1:9000# for Unix socket: unix:/var/run/php7.0-fpm.sock;
root@hzvm01:/etc/nginx/sites-enabled# ps -ef | grep php
root 6435 1 0 14:39 ? 00:00:32 php-fpm: master process (/etc/php/7.0/fpm/php-fpm.conf)
spelix 6439 6435 0 14:39 ? 00:00:00 php-fpm: pool batch
spelix 6440 6435 0 14:39 ? 00:00:00 php-fpm: pool batch
www-data 10576 6435 1 18:45 ? 00:00:48 php-fpm: pool www
www-data 10920 6435 1 18:47 ? 00:00:47 php-fpm: pool www
www-data 10927 6435 1 18:47 ? 00:00:46 php-fpm: pool www
sudo apt-get install php7.0-fpm

Nginx
Lightweight HTTP server
Event based request handling
Open Source project (BSD)
Development started in 2002 by Igor Sysoev to solve the c10k problem
Commercial version NGINX Plus

Leading among
top 100.000 websites

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
# max_clients = worker_processes * worker_connections
worker_processes 8; # number of CPUs
pcre_jit on; # enable JIT for regex
events {
worker_connections 1024;
multi_accept on;
}

Integration
• Static content served by Nginx
• Dynamic requests sent to PHP
server {
listen 80;
server_name www.yourdomain.com;
root /var/www/test;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
location ~* .(html|js|css|gif|jpg|jpe|jpeg|png|bmp|tif|pdf|ico)$ {
try_files $uri =404;
}
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
location ~* .php$ {
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}

Communication via sockets
• TCP vs Unix
• Unix slightly faster when used on localhost
• Use TCP for high load
location ~* .php$ {
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $fastcgi_script_name;
}
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php7.0-fpm.sock;

Transaction flow

URL rewrite
...
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php
...
http://www.mysite.com/news/browse/2014
 to be processed by index.php

URL rewrite
server {
listen 80;
root /var/www;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
server_name www.mysite.com;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ @missing;
}
location @missing {
rewrite (.*) /index.php;
}
location ~ .php$ {
fastcgi_index index.php;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
}
}
http://www.mysite.com/news/browse/2014
 to be processed by index.php

URL rewrite
using Nginx/PHP-FPM there’s a better way:
server {
listen 80;
root /var/www;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
server_name www.mysite.com;
location /images {
try_files $uri =404;
}
location /scripts {
try_files $uri =404;
}
location / {
fastcgi_index index.php;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/index.php;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
}
}
<?php
$params = explode('/', $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_URI"]);
...

Finish Web Request
<?php
do_some_processing();
render_page();
fastcgi_finish_request();
do_slower_stuff(Array(
‘convert_uploaded_videos’,
‘post_to_social_media_platforms’,
‘backup_data’,
‘much more’
));
?>

Nginx and Caching

Nginx FastCGI cache
• Part of Nginx' FastCGI module
fastcgi_cache_path /etc/nginx/cache levels=1:2 keys_zone=APPKEY:100m inactive=60m;
fastcgi_cache_key "$scheme$request_method$host$request_uri";
location ~* .php$ {
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_cache APPKEY;
fastcgi_cache_valid 200 60m;
}

FastCGI cache in action
<?php
echo time()."n";
?>

FastCGI cache in action
<?php
echo time()."n";
?>

FastCGI cache in action
<?php
echo time()."n";
?>

Full page cache with Memcached
<?php
...
function __construct () {
$this->c = new Memcached();
$this->c->addServer('localhost',11211);
}
function setCache ($key, $content) {
$this->c->set($key, $content);
}
...
// get HTML content
$html = $this->renderPage();
$this->setCache($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], $html);
echo $html;
...
?>

Data cache with Memcached
<?php
...
function __construct () {
$this->c = new Memcached();
$this->c->addServer('localhost',11211);
}
function setCache ($key, $content) {
$this->c->set($key, $content);
}
...
// get data structure
$newslist = $this->getNewsList();
$this->setCache('/data/news/getlist', json_encode($newslist));
...
?>

Full page / data cache with Nginx and Memcached
• ngx_http_memcached_module
server {
location / {
set $memcached_key "$uri";
memcached_pass localhost:11211;
error_page 404 502 504 = @notincache;
}
location @notincache {
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}

PHP, 5k requests, concurrency 100
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Apache+PHP Nginx+PHP Nginx+Memcached
<?php
echo "Hello World";
?>
7,28 4,6 3,05
totaltimeinsec

Caching Static Content
• set HTTP response expires header
location ~ .(html|js|css|gif|jpg|jpe|jpeg|png|bmp|tif|pdf|ico)$ {
expires 365d;
access_log off;
error_log off;
log_not_found off;
add_header Cache-Control "public";
try_files $uri =404;
}

Filehandle Caching
• keep handlers for requested static files open
open_file_cache max=1000 inactive=5m;
open_file_cache_valid 60s;
open_file_cache_min_uses 5;
open_file_cache_errors off;

FastCGI request forwarding
server {
listen 80;
root /var/www/mysite;
server_name www.mysite.com;
location / {
try_files $uri =405;
}
location ~ .php$ {
fastcgi_pass 192.168.56.12:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}

FastCGI request forwarding
upstream php {
server 192.168.56.12:9000;
}
server {
listen 80;
root /var/www/mysite;
server_name www.mysite.com;
location / {
try_files $uri =405;
}
location ~ .php$ {
fastcgi_pass php;
fastcgi_index index.php;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}

Load balancing
upstream php {
ip_hash;
server unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock weight=5;
server 192.168.56.12:9000 weight=2;
server 192.168.56.13:9000;
server 192.168.56.14:9000 backup;
}
server {
listen 80;
root /var/www/mysite;
server_name www.mysite.com;
location / {
try_files $uri =405;
}
location ~ .php$ {
fastcgi_pass php;
fastcgi_index index.php;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}

High scalability

desktop traffic
response time

slow response time
traffic using chrome

My favorite performance tools
• Load Generator (Apache Benchmark, Selenium, JMeter)
• Firebug, Google Developer Tools
• Dynatrace Application Monitoring Free Trial
• Free trial license for 30 days
• Free personal license for developers
• Dynatrace Ruxit
• 2016 free hours for monitoring
http://bit.ly/monitoring-2016
http://bit.ly/dttrial

Further information
http://apmblog.dynatrace.com
http://apmblog.dynatrace.com/2014/08/19/easily-boost-web-application-using-nginx/
http://apmblog.dynatrace.com/2014/10/30/proper-configuration-running-php-nginx/
http://apmblog.dynatrace.com/2015/11/24/cool-new-stuff-on-the-nginx-front/
https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/

Harald Zeitlhofer
Performance Advocate
@HZeitlhofer
harald.zeitlhofer@dynatrace.com
http://blog.dynatrace.com
Dynatrace Free Trial
Free Personal License
Ruxit Free Trial
http://bit.ly/monitoring-2016
events@dynatrace.com