When to use Nginx PHP Fast CGI with a TCP socket instead of a UNIX socket?

Posted by user64204 on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by user64204
Published on 2012-05-31T08:56:20Z Indexed on 2012/05/31 10:43 UTC
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I've followed this guide to setup PHP in FastCGI mode with Nginx. This guide describes 2 ways of doing it: TCP socket and UNIX socket.

I've ran some Apache Benchmark on my locale machine and here are the results:

Below tests ran multiple times to get better average statistics:

$ ab -c 200 -n 100000 http://....

APACHE: 1800 req/sec 
NGINX (TCP socket): 2500 req/sec
NGINX (UNIX socket): 15000 req/sec

As far as I understand, there is overhead with using a TCP socket rather than a UNIX socket, hence the better performance with the latter. However I was not expecting such a performance difference given that the TCP socket is on the localhost, and therefore would like to ask the following question:

Q: Given the huge performance gain with using a UNIX socket, what are the configuration scenarios where it would make sense to use a TCP socket instead?

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