It's actually less forgotten now than it was in 2002.
Apache's FastCGI support was atrocious until mod_proxy_fcgi arrived only a few years ago. This severely limited FastCGI adoption in Apache territory. But sometime in the mid-00s lighttpd came along, and then nginx. Both of them not only supported but required FastCGI to interface with PHP. So the lighttpd guys developed spawn-fcgi, which was a huge step ahead of Apache's mod_fastcgi/mod_fcgid. With the increasing popularity of nginx, PHP itself adopted FPM (FastCGI Process Manager), which went yet another step ahead of spawn-fcgi. The performance gains were unbelievable! That was sometime between 2006 and 2008 IIRC, just when PHP was starting to clean up after itself.
PHP-FPM is now the preferred way to run PHP no matter what webserver you use (perhaps with the exception of IIS). It keeps things running fast and smooth without giving up PHP's straightforward, CGI-like execution model.
Apache's FastCGI support was atrocious until mod_proxy_fcgi arrived only a few years ago. This severely limited FastCGI adoption in Apache territory. But sometime in the mid-00s lighttpd came along, and then nginx. Both of them not only supported but required FastCGI to interface with PHP. So the lighttpd guys developed spawn-fcgi, which was a huge step ahead of Apache's mod_fastcgi/mod_fcgid. With the increasing popularity of nginx, PHP itself adopted FPM (FastCGI Process Manager), which went yet another step ahead of spawn-fcgi. The performance gains were unbelievable! That was sometime between 2006 and 2008 IIRC, just when PHP was starting to clean up after itself.
PHP-FPM is now the preferred way to run PHP no matter what webserver you use (perhaps with the exception of IIS). It keeps things running fast and smooth without giving up PHP's straightforward, CGI-like execution model.