nginx + PHP-FPM farm?

Question

I have a setup with two small servers running nginx serving as proxy and a number of Apache+mod_php beefy servers. I am thinking on going over to PHP-FPM. Can I configure nginx to use a number of FastCGI servers? Or PHP-FPM itself to use workers on different machines? Or do I need to run nginx on the workers?

Answer 1

no you can run 1 nginx machine and many php-fpm machines.

upstream php {
  server 10.0.0.1:9000;
  server 10.0.0.2:9000;
  server 10.0.0.3:9000;
}

Then in your locaction

fastcgi_pass php;

Answer 2

A complement to Mike's answer.

Check this vulnerability that can arise when you have nginx and PHP-FPM in different servers. The bottom line is: don't allow users to upload content to your public directory.