Improving PHP Performance

How to Improve PHP Performance

  • You should consider using one of our LiteSpeed Cache Plugins. These should make your site fly.

  • Try PHP 7 instead of PHP 5.x. PHP 7 claims to be twice as fast as PHP 5.x.

  • Install and enable PHP opcode cache.

  • Make sure PHP xdebug and snmp modules are disabled if you don't need them. xdebug module is for Dev IDE integration only and should not be installed by default. snmp module will scan and parse available MIB files; not everyone needs snmp support.

  • Check the real time stats for the number of PHP processes during peak time (LSWS Web Admin → Actions → Real-Time Stats→External Application). Check “In Use”, “Idle”, and “WaitQ”. If WaitQ is frequently higher than 0, the PHP max concurrency setting may need to be increased. For shared hosting environments, where PHP SuEXEC is normally used, PHP suEXEC Max Conn needs to be increased. See our PHP Concurrency wiki for more information on determining if PHP SuEXEC is used and how to increase the max concurrency of PHP.

  • If you see something like: [STDERR] Reached max children process limit: 10, extra: 3, current: 13, please increase LSAPI_CHILDREN, try to increase LSAPI_CHILDREN.

  • If the server has enough free memory, put PHP sessions and opcode cache disk storage under /dev/shm.

  • Have you enabled the timezonedb module for your PHP? We do see poorer performance when people move to a cloud server with shared storage; the I/O latency could cause trouble. Without PHP timezonedb module with built-in DB, it may not have a huge impact on a server with the local disk but it will be very costly for a cloud server with shared storage since PHP will scan hundreds of directories.

  • Check your “top” output to determine which processes are using too much CPU/memory. Buggy PHP code could be causing these performance issues.

  • For a cpanel/WHM user, disable the PHP open_basedir feature.