But he is using the APC cache, which is part of PHP, so I'm not sure he could pull that off? PHP-FPM is the fastest way he could be using that interpreter anyh

But he is using the APC cache, which is part of PHP, so I'm not sure he could pull that off? PHP-FPM is the fastest way he could be using that interpreter anyhow, as it maintains a persistent bank of PHP instances in-memory, with nginx acting as a proxy to it via a Unix socket.