suPHP vs FastCGI on dedicated sharing WordPress hosting

[Revolved]

I have been researching the pros and cons of suPHP vs FastCGI for performance and security.

FastCGI has the security benefits of suPHP based on ownership and is fast at the expense of memory. FastCGI also will allow for the use of caching. Leading to better methods of increasing site (WordPress) performance.

suPHP is secure. An consumes more cpu cycles instead of memory. In general suPHP is slower but can handle higher traffic loads more gracefully (when overloaded).

I am currently using suPHP and we are starting to get regular oom. So switching to FastCGI at this point would be a bad idea, I think.

Is it possible that once the database/page/etc caches are built (for the most common queries etc) the overall resource usage would become acceptable?

We are upgrading to a dedicated and would like opinions on using FastCGI or stick with suPHP. I'm planning on trying FastCGI before the upgrade just to make sure everything works as expected.

Thoughts?

 

[Revolved]

I tested switching to FastCGI and ended up with all sites on the server loading blank pages. I did the test during a low traffic period as I would expect a spike in memory usage but I did not expect blank pages.

Going to read and try again.

 

[jnicol]

I can't speak for FastCGI vs suPHP (I've only used suPHP), but if you decide to stick with suPHP you can still improve performance for a WP site using W3 Total Cache, if you're not already doing so. It's probably not as fast as using a PHP opcode cache, but in test results I've seen, caching plugins such as W3TC can halve total page load time.