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(I googled and searched this forum for hours, found some topics, but none of them worked for me)

I'm using Wordpress with: Varnish + Nginx + PHP-FPM + APC + W3 Total Cache + PageSpeed.

As I'm using Varnish, first time I call www.mysite.com it use just 10% of CPU. Calling the second time, it will be cached. The problem is passing request parameter in URL.

For just 1 request (www.mysite.com?1=1) it shows in top:

PID  USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM   TIME+  COMMAND
7609 nginx     20   0  438m  41m  28m S 11.6  7.0   0:00.35 php-fpm
7606 nginx     20   0  437m  39m  26m S 10.3  6.7   0:00.31 php-fpm

After the page is fully loaded, these processes above are still active. And after 2 seconds, they are replaced by another 2 php-fpm processes(below), which are active for 3 seconds.

PID USER       PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM   TIME+  COMMAND
7665 nginx     20   0  444m  47m  28m S 20.9  7.9   0:00.69 php-fpm
7668 nginx     20   0  444m  46m  28m R 20.9  7.9   0:00.63 php-fpm

40% CPU usage just for 1 request not cached!

Strange things:

  • CPU usage is higher after the page was loaded
  • When I purged the cache (W3 and Varnish), it take just 10% of CPU to load a not cached page
  • This high CPU usage just happend passing request parameter or in Wordpress Admin

When I try to do 10 request(pressing F5 key 10x), the server stop serving and in php-fpm log appears:

WARNING: [pool www] server reached max_children setting (10), consider raising it

I raised that value to 20, same problem.

I'm using pm=ondemand (pm.max_children=10 and pm.max_requests=500).

Inittialy I was using pm=dynamic (pm.max_children=10, pm.start_servers=1, pm.min_spare_servers=1, pm.min_spare_servers=2, pm.max_requests=500) and it happened the same problem.

Anyone could help, plz? Any help would be appreciated!

PS:

  • APC is ON (98% Hits, 2% Misses)
  • Server is Amazon Micro (613MB RAM)
  • PHP 5.3.26 (fpm-fcgi)
  • Linux version 3.4.48-45.46.amzn1.x86_64 Red Hat 4.6.3-2 (I think it's based on CentOS 5)
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It's hard to debug where the problem is coming from.

I'd say slim your setup down.

You are using: Varnish + Nginx + PHP-FPM + APC + W3 Total Cache + PageSpeed

Why do you need Varnish? nginx can also do caching for static pages. Take a look at fastcgi_cache

PHP-FPM and APC should be fine, just consider given APC enough memory so that all files can be cached without memory problems and fragmentation.

Why do you need W3 Total Cache? Depending on the configuration options this can hog a lot of CPU e.g. for minifying code or caching pages or database calls to disk...

The same with mod_pagespeed - It's a wrapper that processes your output files and also adds complexity that uses CPU cycles.

So - If you want a faster website I'd say untangle that mess and simplify it:

  • Get rid of Varnish: If you don't have a strong use case for it. nginx can do caching just fine and configure nginx to make use of fastcgi_cache and use a socket to talk to PHP-FPM.

  • Get rid of W3TC: Use memcached and and the memcache object caching plugin. This is your DB-Cache and Object-Cache. For caching complete pages just use nginx or Varnish if you must. You can get rid of configuring full page caching for nginx or Varnish if you use batcache for caching whole pages in memcached. Also try to use sockets for memcached.

  • Get rid of mod_pagespeed. Read into what optimisation it does for you and try to apply these on your blog theme or images by hand. If you are using gzip in nginx most of the stuff shouldn't be important anyway.

  • Enable the MySQL query cache and look for performance optimized MySQL settings. If you have a lot of writes (e.g. lots of comments) consider using InnoDB.

  • Use PHP 5.4 or even PHP 5.5 - Lots's of performance and memory improvements went into these releases that should give you some speedup and memory savings.

More advanced approaches:

Take a look at xdebug profiler. This should give you a rundown what function does consume a lot of cpu. The page gives some details on how to look at the generated data using kcachegrind.

You could try to look at the amount of syscalls using strace on the process tree. You'll need to -f flag for this and probably just printing statistics -c should be enough to learn about a possible problem.

I'd say apply the KISS principle and only make use of performance or tuning stuff if you have a clear use case for it and the tools show an improvement using profiling.

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  • Wow! Thanks for the detailed response! The reasons I'm using Varnish instead of fastcgi_cache are: Cache Statistics (easier to find when to increase caches RAM) + Easier to purge + As it's in memory, less IO Disk (in Amazon we pay for that). W3TC is being used just to do Database+Object Cache (but it's using Disk Cache). I'm just worried using Nginx with Memcache because it read that is hard to purge. As I will edit some posts, using Varnish I can purge directly in my WP-Admin, with 1 click. Are there any easy way to purge Page Cached in Memcache with Nginx? – Márcio Jul 14 '13 at 17:23
  • I'm using Pretty Link Lite Plugin (it's like bit.ly, but with some extras features: private statistics + you can change the redirect URL without changing the shortened link - very useful to manage aff. links). But links created by that plugin will not be cached. To improve performance of that, I'm using DB-Cache and Object-Cache from W3TC(Disk Cache), but its consuming 3% CPU for each link clicked. Do you think using MySQL query cache or DB-Cache+Object-Cache from Memcached will help to increase the performance of these type of link? – Márcio Jul 14 '13 at 17:29
  • Some thoughts: Use memcache or APC for W3TC - there is also a plugin for using APC as object cache provider. Using disk here does not make much sense, because there a lot of reads and writes (multiple per second on my installation pic. There is a plugin called nginx_helper that adds purge support for fastcgi_cache, never used that through. Finding a good cache_key can be difficult. I'd use MySQL query cache + object cache with either APC/memcache. DB-Cache is not so important – mt_ Jul 14 '13 at 19:17
  • It really depends on your site and what you want to accomplish but I'd safe memory for PHP/Wordpress and use static files or pages (It's still fast enough because the OS puts often used files in RAM anyway) and use the memory for MySQL and APC/memcache that get's read and written to more often. You should also configure fastcgi_cache to only cache a page if it request more than 3-4 times. Saves a lot of IO and the site is still safe for reddit/news.yc – mt_ Jul 14 '13 at 19:22
  • to clarify: You can either use W3TC with a APC/memcache backend or drop W3TC and use the Wordpress plugins directly. I've made the experience that using the plugins directly is in the end more hassle free and slightly faster but things may have changed in the meantime (spend some time on this problem 1-2years ago) – mt_ Jul 14 '13 at 19:25

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