PHP 5.4.0 released

Posted Mar 5, 2012 8:50 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Privilege separation isn't the only advantage of setups like FastCGI or WSGI that keep the language interpreter separate from the web server. Another advantage is that you get to proxy only those requests to the language interpreter that actually need it, while requests for, say, small static image files don't occupy expensive language-interpreter-containing Apache processes. This is probably the #1 thing you can do to speed up dynamic web sites.

There are of course other ways of achieving this – e.g., by putting a more lightweight web server in front of your Apache/mod_php to serve any static content and have that server proxy only the PHP stuff to the actual Apache, or by serving static content from a different server altogether –, but mpm-itk isn't one of them.