If you are running WordPress on Nginx, PHP and spawn-fcgi, you may have noticed that sometimes PHP/spawn-fcgi crashes and hangs up. So far it happened to me twice in a week. One of the key reasons appears to be warnings and fatal errors in PHP but we can't pinpoint the exact cause of the PHP downtime so far.
As a temporary solution we use "monit" to control the spawn-fcgi auto-restart. It's a dirty hack - trust us - we know. But it sure prevents us from looking stupid when the 502 Gateway problem page shows instead of the site.
A quick fix
1 | $ apt-get install monit |
Then some configuration stuff we need to take care off:
edit /etc/default/monit and set the 'startup=1' parameter
then in /etc/monit/monitrc change the parameters to represent the spawn-fcgi setup.
1 2 3 4 5 6 | set daemon 60 # check services at 1-minute intervals ... check host localhost with address 127.0.0.1 start program = "/etc/init.d/spawn-fcgi start" stop program = "/etc/init.d/spawn-fcgi stop" if failed port 53217 then restart |
Kill your cgi and wait 60 seconds to see it come up again. If it does, the workaround is in place, if it doesn't... check the configuration files again.
UPDATE: I've replaced spawncgi with php5-fpm package which totally outperforms the spawncgi solutions. This is a lot more stable than the former solution This page is the most popular one of my whole blog, just to give you an idea, switch over to php5-fpm and forget about spawncgi.
Glenn