kimek / ngingx-phpfm-playground

This playground allows you to experiment with the concepts explained in my post "Demystifying Nginx and PHP-FPM for PHP Developers", helping you understand the impact of different configurations on the performance of your PHP application.

Nginx & PHP-FPM - Playground

This playground allows you to experiment with the concepts explained in my post Demystifying Nginx and PHP-FPM for PHP Developers, helping you understand the impact of different configurations on the performance of your PHP application.

Setup

1. Install Docker and Docker Compose.
2. Clone this repository.
3. Run make xxx to start the Nginx and PHP-FPM containers, where "xxx" is one of the process manager strategies explained in the post (static, dynamic or ondemand).
4. Visit http://localhost:8080/ and the message "PHP script completed" should be displayed.

Configuration

To modify the settings of PHP-FPM and Nginx, edit the scenarios-config/.env.xxx file of your chosed process manager strategy. Restart the make xxx command.

Variables

• PHPFPM_CONTAINER_MEM_LIMIT: sets a memory limit to the php-fpm container. This parameter allows you to see the behavior of the container when memory is allocated in different ways.

• PM_STRATEGY: Set the process manager strategy to static, dynamic or ondemand.

• PM_MAX_CHILDREN: Defines the maximum number of worker processes that can be created.

• PM_MAX_REQUESTS: Number of total requests a single worker can process after which it's restarted.

• PM_REQUEST_TERMINATE_TIMEOUT: Max execution time in seconds before php-fpm terminates a worker.

• PM_CHILDREN_MEMORY_LIMIT: Determines the maximum amount of memory a worker can allocate

• PM_START_SERVERS: Determines the initial number of worker processes to be created at startup.

• PM_MIN_SPARE_SERVERS: Sets the minimum number of idle worker processes that should be always maintained. If the number of idle workers falls below this value, PHP-FPM will create additional processes.

• PM_MAX_SPARE_SERVERS: Specifies the maximum number of idle worker processes allowed. If the number of idle workers exceeds this value, PHP-FPM will terminate excess processes.

• PM_PROCESS_IDLE_TIMEOUT: Indicates the duration after which idle worker processes will be terminated.

• PHP_MEM_USED_IN_MB: Sets a fixed amount of memory used by your php script.

• PHP_EXECUTION_TIME_IN_SECONDS: Sets a fixed amount of seconds your php script takes to be processed.

Load Testing

In order to see how your architecture behaves in a concurrent environment you need to send multiple HTTP requests in parallel. There are different tools in the market for this purpose. You can use ab (Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool) to easily send batches of concurrent requests up to a total limit:

ab -n 500 -c 100 http://localhost:8080/index.php

In the previous example, you are sending batches of 100 simultaneous requests up to 500 requests in total.

New Testing Scenarios

You can create many configurations for different scenarios in the scenarios-config directory.

1. Create a new .env.xxx file where "xxx" can be any name.
2. Adjust the values.
3. Add a new entry to the Makefile file:

xxx:
	docker-compose --env-file scenarios-config/.env.xxx up

4. Run make xxx to restart Nginx and PHP-FPM with the new config.

Monitoring

When your containers are up and running, you can visit the built-in status pages provided by Nginx (http://localhost:8080/stub_status) and PHP-FPM (http://localhost:8080/status) to check out their health and performance.

Also, you can monitor the resources usage of the PHP-FPM and Nginx containers by running docker stats php-fpm and docker stats nginx respectively.