Trying to get my head around the way to install APC cache on PHP 5.3.13. That's a VPS with apache, configured preferably through whm/cpanel (although not only).

I read a bunch of articles where it was suggested to use FastCGI with APC, as suPHP doens't do well with opcode caching, and fcgid_module doesn't do it right for APC either. Noted that fcgid_module is a newer package than FastCGI and that's what whm/cpanel installs for you but ok, that can be solved I guess. Then I'm reading that php-fpm is a much better alternative to manage the php processes, especially for APC.

Ok. Then I realised that php-fpm is included in php core since 5.3 and got confused. Does that mean I don't have to use FastCGI/fcgid_module (and what should I use instead of them - mod_php or cgi?)? Or does that mean that I still need to get the older FastCGI module, and configure it to use one process per user (or just one process?)? Or would fcgid_module work as well?

And how bad would it be just to go with mod_php/APC to avoid troubles of installing php-fpm and FastCGI (whm/cpanel doesn't support neither) given than Varnish would serve most of the static content anyway - no php process need to be created for static content.

Any examples of their FastCGI/fcgid_module/php-fpm/APC configurations would be greatly appreciated as well.