php_logoThe idea for this post actually came from observing performance after moving this site over to WordPress (and to a lesser extent, my other website, General Photography). I use Puppet orchestration for my servers and I made the mistake of trying to convert everything to puppet manifests and also get things working how I wanted without fully understanding how puppet works at the same time; That however is another story. This does means that my puppet manifests are not very flexible currently and I use suphp as my main PHP handler just because for me, at the time, it was easier.

That being said – I’m fully aware of the performance issues suphp exhibits because my Observium install used it at first – it now uses mod_php because loading all the graphs was noticably slow. I thought I’d try to quantify the performance differences between suphp and mod_php and decided I should do all 3 common PHP handlers. Whilst I was gathering metrics for this I decided It’d be useful to include PHP7 results too.