[pram]

Probably a lot of mod_* uses like PHP applications that haven't been migrated to php-fpm or something, and JBoss/Tomcat/Websphere/Weblogic websites. You of course can just proxy all of these things with nginx, but it's probably not worth it for most companies.

[developer2]

PHP is definitely a huge chunk of the reason why nginx has taken over Apache. php-fpm with nginx is the defacto standard, and PHP is far more prevalent than a lot of people think. Apache's mod_php(X) vs. nginx+php-fpm isn't even a debate. If someone is currently using Apache+mod_php, they probably have a smaller product that will eventually have to switch to nginx+fpm in order to scale.

While I imagine PHP is the single largest reason, other languages that support or expect the use of fastcgi are also very easy to configure with nginx, whereas I can count on one hand the number of businesses I've seen using Apache's mod_fcgid.

[Zachery]

I'm probably about 2 years out of being bleeding edge, but php-fpm&nginx are far from defacto standard. At least when you look at how the web is being served at large, looking at cPanel/WHM.

I don't believe cPanel/WHM even supports nginx yet as a standard option.

[developer2]

Not to be disrespectful - I know that cPanel and similar have their place - but no real business that expects to have a presence is using cPanel or any other "easy setup".

[wolco]

fpm is being dropped now that php 7 contains many of the improvements that made fpm popular. php_mod+apache with .htaccess turned off is the faster stack. Put a nginx server to server static content in front and that's the fastest stack going forward

[devwastaken]

FPM isn't just popular because of speed. Its popular because of pools and the fact that its not a giant security risk by having it installed. mod_php shares permissions across everything it executes. If you have any site on the same Apache stack as another, they're accessible to each other as far as PHP is concerned. This makes the attack surface of a website significantly larger unless you're hosting exactly one site you have locked down to one directory.

I also really doubt that php7.1 mod and apache without .htaccess is faster than nginx and php7.1-fpm under 'ondemand' mode. Even a 5$ DO server can handle hundreds of requests a second to big frameworks like Drupal or Mediawiki, and they're securely seperated. Locking down permissions on a group level to the executing php-pool, so you can then make only specific users belong to that pool and bind a directory in their home to the actual website location.

[adrianfalleiro]

FPM is being dropped? This is news to me, where can I read about this?

[wolco]

As people upgrade many are choosing PHP 7 through mod_php

The below are links to benchmarks and discussions around mod_php vs. fpm. These are from last year 2016. Fast forward to today; I am seeing people move to php 7 and move back to mod_php. I believe we are at the start of a movement. Articles/stories will follow but only after the fact.

https://www.symfony.fi/entry/symfony-benchmarks-php-fpm-vs-p...

https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/4bi9a4/why_is_mod_php_...

[developer2]

The first link is about PHP-PM, which is not mod_php, and is a new and unproven stack. The second link is a completely bullshit "echo 'Hello World';" with 100 concurrent requests - that benchmark is offering the stereotypical, utterly meaningless, metric.

The fact is that Apache + mod_php will keep an instance of the PHP interpreter active in every single child httpd process. With nginx+fpm, your static assets are served directly from nginx without the overhead of an unnecessary PHP interpreter loaded into that process, while only your PHP requests are funneled to FPM. The performance overhead of having a PHP interpreter loaded into the process that is only serving a static asset is astronomical.

At the end of the day, benchmark your shippable product. Never try to benchmark a "Hello World" or a Wordpress installation if you're not shipping a Hello World or Wordpress codebase. Purely based off professional experience, I have never seen a real-world app perform better on Apache+mod_php than on nginx+fpm.

The only thing PHP 7 gave us was essentially the ability to ignore HHVM as a "required performance booster". 90% of companies were already able to ignore HHVM; with the improvements made to PHP 7, it's now 95-99%+ of products that don't need to evaluate HHVM as a mandatory alternative. And yes, nginx+fpm is still the defacto standard for PHP 7; the links you have provided do not say any different.

[scurvy]

I can only speak for myself, but I'd rather avoid the Apache HTTPD stack altogether. If you run multiple PHP FPM pools, it's nicer and easier to only recycle individual pools as necessary (rather than the whole process). Important to those of us who run lots of microservices (or even lots of PHP sites) on single hosts.