Speeding up your site with PHP FPM.

As of January 2025, most of our webservers are supporting php versions 7.4 and 8.4 in FPM.

The key benefit of FPM is that it allows for a persistent cache of compiled php scripts (opcache). For a website that uses a lot of PHP scripts (wordpress being the classic example), this can be a huge performance boost.

Being a cache, it doesn't speed up the first page load (in fact, that's a little bit slower - 20%?). But the second page load will typically be 80% faster. I've seen load times on a slow wordpress site containing over 19000 files go from an average load times of 1.9 seconds to 0.3 seconds. For a minimal wordpress install, the change would be closer to 0.300 to 0.050 seconds.

Drawbacks? it's a little more complex from BareMetal's point of view, so if you're just using php to include other html files, or doing very basic dynamic content, you're likely better off sticking to plain PHP. php.ini files need to be renamed to .user.ini (which still works for plain PHP). That's about it.

How do you enable it? the https://yourdomain/sec-bin/ menu lets you pick the FPM versions of PHP the same way you select any other PHP version.