php vs php-fpm benchmarks

Hi, just to test I created two Centos 8 with apache and php, clean nothing more than update the kernel to 5.6.12
By default, on Centos 8, php is installed with php-fpm enable and configured.
To make Benchmark test I disable php-fpm on Server 1
Server 2 has enable php-fpm
Both servers show which version of php are using:
Server 1: Server API Apache 2.0 Handler
Server 2: Server API FPM/FastCGI

when I ran a simple ab test (ab -n 5000 -c 100 http://localhost:80/) I got the next results:

Server 1:
Requests per second: 1887.44 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 52.982 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.530 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 117308.73 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 0.8 0 9
Processing: 12 51 4.6 50 86
Waiting: 8 50 4.6 50 68
Total: 21 51 4.2 50 86

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 50
66% 52
75% 53
80% 54
90% 56
95% 59
98% 62
99% 63
100% 86 (longest request)

Server 2:
Requests per second: 1383.05 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 72.304 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.723 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 80832.62 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 1 1.6 0 14
Processing: 26 68 8.2 67 135
Waiting: 26 68 8.2 67 116
Total: 39 69 8.2 68 135

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 68
66% 70
75% 72
80% 73
90% 79
95% 84
98% 92
99% 99
100% 135 (longest request)

As you can see, seems like php has better performance than php-fpm

Does anyone knows why? and how to improve better performance on php-fpm?

If the configuration match you will get the same results, so it sounds like you have too few php-fpm pools. Personally I'm using static pools so that they don't shut down. I don't really care about memory consumption, as it's tuned to never bottleneck.

https://tideways.com/profiler/blog/an-in...fpm-tuning

Apache with mod_php have a higher amount of processes started (can start) as it needs to both deliver static content as well as PHP. Now with apache + php-fpm, you have the same amount of apache processes but limited php processes instead. So it needs to be tuned.

thank you, I will try