Centos – PHP fastCGI won’t stop, trying to start PHP fpm

On my server I use nginx+fcgi as well.

My solution isn't foolproof but at least works. I have this script which uses spawn-fcgi and php5-cgi under /etc/init.d/

#!/bin/bash
PHP_SCRIPT='/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9000 -u www-data -f /usr/bin/php5-cgi'
RETVAL=0
case "$1" in
    start)
      $PHP_SCRIPT
      RETVAL=$?
  ;;
    stop)
      killall -9 php5-cgi
      RETVAL=$?
  ;;
    restart)
      killall -9 php5-cgi
      $PHP_SCRIPT
      RETVAL=$?
  ;;
    *)
      echo "Usage: php-fastcgi {start|stop|restart}"
      exit 1
  ;;
esac
exit $RETVAL

and the related nginx conf is this:

server {
        location ~ .php$ {
                        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                        fastcgi_index index.php;
                        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi.conf;
                        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/hyperblasted/$fastcgi_script_name;
        }
        ...
}

and the fastcgi.conf contains the following

fastcgi_param GATEWAY_INTERFACE CGI/1.1;
fastcgi_param SERVER_SOFTWARE nginx;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI $request_uri;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_URI $document_uri;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT $document_root;
fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL $server_protocol;
fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR $remote_addr;
fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT $remote_port;
fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR $server_addr;
fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT $server_port;
fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME $server_name;

Hope this helps :)

PS: With this setup I had an issue where the cgi daemon would die every now and then. I worked around this issue by executing this in a cronjob every 5 minutes:

if ps aux | grep 'php5-cgi' | grep -v grep  > /dev/null ; then
        echo "PHP-cgi is runnning !"    
else
        echo "PHP-cgi is down. Starting over..."
        /etc/init.d/php-fcgi start
fi

I think your max_children is too low

<value name="max_children">3</value>

Also you can try switching from TCP port to unix socket for php-fpm:

php-fpm.conf

<value name="listen_address">/tmp/php.sock</value>

nginx.conf

fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/php.sock;

Elaborated:

1. Unix sockets are ~20% faster
2. You don't use time-wait sockets for each connect