Arch Linux (the linux distribution I use) updated PHP to 5.3.3 yesterday and added the php-fpm package so I decided to switch to using that instead of a hacked up spawn-fcgi and my own process launcher (Servitor).
I didn’t have to change anything in the nginx configuration file, but here’s the php-fpm configuration recipe:
[blurringexistence_net]
listen = /srv/http/fastcgi/blurringexistence_net-php.sock
listen.owner = http
listen.group = http
listen.mode = 0600
user = blurringexistence_net
group = blurringexistence_net
pm = dynamic
pm.max_children = 50
pm.start_servers = 5
pm.min_spare_servers = 2
pm.max_spare_servers = 35
pm.max_requests = 500
chdir = /srv/http/vhosts/blurringexistence_net/public_html/
php_flag[output_buffering] = off
php_admin_value[open_basedir] = /srv/http/:/home/:/tmp/:/usr/share/pear/:/usr/bin/
php_admin_value[post_max_size] = 32M
php_admin_value[upload_max_filesize] = 32M
I also moved the php.ini changes into the php-fpm configuration file as I found no way to tell php-fpm to load a different php.ini file for a specific instance but that’s a probably a good thing as it decreases maintenance efforts when the ini file changes after an update of php.
Now all that’s left is setting up php-fpm’s chroot feature and / or getting rid of /usr/bin/ in open_basedir.