Topic: mod_h2 + mod_php - can requests be serviced in parallel?

[hredelmyer]

For reasons beyond my control I need to use mod_php with Apache.

I was playing with mod_h2. My web page does a lot of requests to the service on loading that are handled by PHP.

Without mod_h2 enabled, these are a farmed out to several httpd processes - as many as the browser deigns to send in parallel.

With mod_h2 enabled, all the requests seem to be sent to a single httpd process and are processed one at a time. The page therefore loads twice as slowly than without h2. I was hoping to be able to process more of the requests in parallel.

Questions:

1) Is there a way of configuring mod_php + mod_h2 to allow more than one httpd process to handle the requests?

2) Would fastcgi send the requests off to several different PHP processes or does it suffer the same problem?

3) If I used nginx to handle the http2 and forward the requests to the apache server would I get more parallelism?

4) Has anyone come up with a google or other search engine query that can actually find useful information on this topic?

Thanks
Horace

[covener]

Presumably you're on prefork, There's no way way to redistribute the requests on a single h2 connection and no safe way to run them through mop_php in parallel.

FastCGI would be able to run in parallel, out of process. At that point you'd bail on prefork too.

[icing]

As Eric wrote, fastcgi should be the way to go foward, if you can make it work with your php app.

The thing you described for nginx, a reverse proxy in front of your php, can also be done with Apache, or nghttpd or h2o. But a worker/event mpm with fastcgi should server you better.