> Its just... not really that much simpler than FCGI / php-fpm in my experience. I mean, there are a lot of options to run PHP out there: for sites that don't

> Its just... not really that much simpler than FCGI / php-fpm in my experience. I mean, there are a lot of options to run PHP out there: for sites that don't get a lot of traffic, something like mod_php in Apache might just be enough, because configuring php-fpm means that you'll have another process running for executing PHP and you'll need to proxy traffic to it. Personally, I recently tried building my own Ubuntu container images for all of the software that I want to run (excluding databases) and found this in particular to be a pain point. I could get php-fpm installed, used Supervisord to launch multiple processes in the container, but PHP was only executed when I built the container image locally, yet failed to execute PHP when the container image was built on the CI server. I have no idea why exactly that was, even though I tried documenting that mess on my blog "Containers are broken": https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/containers-are-broken https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/containers-... Now, that was probably a build issue (that I managed to resolve by just moving PHP over to Nginx, which seemed to integrate with no issues for whatever random reason), but operationally mod_php seems way simpler, just something that plugs into your web server and lets you process requests directly - even if in a less scalable manner. Then again, nowadays you have multiple MPM choices: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mpm.html https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mpm.html So as far as I can tell, many folks might be using something like mpm_event, which generally performs a bit more efficiently than mpm_prefork or something like it. But using PHP just for CGI, without even trying to integrate with a web server per se? I'm not sure, but given the example above, I'm sure that there are reasons for doing that as well, much like my example of moving one step back from php-fpm, to mod_php if need be.