It's no secret that most dynamic websites today run on PHP which means that on each page load the server needs to load a PHP process and process the PHP file to return a web page readable by the browser. PHP-FPM can help speed up this process and serve more users for your WordPress or other php-based website.
In our configuration, we use LSPHP which uses a special API unrelated to mod_php or CGI, and this is the fastest method of processing PHP at the moment, apart from php-fpm.
However, on our ea-php versions we automatically enable php-fpm which gives you an even higher speed boost and allows you to handle even more PHP requests. This technology is faster as it does not have to launch a new process on a new page visit, but keeps php-fpm pools active for a period of time before they are killed, it can also launch and keep more pools running as more requests are received by the server.
This feature is automatically enabled on WordPress and cPanel hosting, however, if you switch to a version prefixed with alt-php, you will lose the php-fpm functionality. This is because alt-php does not support PHP-FPM.
We still do not have an option that will allow you to enable php-fpm from cPanel, so to enable it you need to switch to ea-php and then contact support so we can enable it from our side.
When we enable it, your website will return a 404 error for a few seconds, and then it will be fully switched to php-fpm and receive all the benefits related to it.
