Here is the content of my /etc/conf.d/php-cgi
file (it's a modified copy of the original spawn-fcgi conf.d file) :
# The FCGI process can be made available through a filesystem socket or
# through a inet socket. One and only one of the two types must be choosen.
# Default is the inet socket.
# The filename specified by
# FCGI_SOCKET will be suffixed with a number for each child process, for
# example, fcgi.socket-1.
# Leave empty to use an IP socket (default). See below. Enabling this,
# disables the IP socket.
#
FCGI_SOCKET=
# When using FCGI_PORT, connections will only be accepted from the following
# address. The default is 127.0.0.1. Use 0.0.0.0 to bind to all addresses.
#
FCGI_ADDRESS=127.0.0.1
# The port specified by FCGI_PORT is the port used
# by the first child process. If this is set to 1234 then subsequent child
# processes will use 1235, 1236, etc.
#
FCGI_PORT=2000
# The path to your FastCGI application. These sometimes carry the .fcgi
# extension but not always. For PHP, you should usually point this to
# /usr/bin/php-cgi.
#
FCGI_PROGRAM=/usr/bin/php-cgi
#FCGI_PROGRAM=/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi
# The number of child processes to spawn. The default is 1.
#
FCGI_CHILDREN=1
# If you want to run your application inside a chroot then specify the
# directory here. Leave this blank otherwise.
#
FCGI_CHROOT=
# If you want to run your application from a specific directiory specify
# it here. Leave this blank otherwise.
#
FCGI_CHDIR=
# The user and group to run your application as. If you do not specify these,
# the application will be run as root:root.
#
FCGI_USER=nginx
FCGI_GROUP=nginx
# Additional options you might want to pass to spawn-fcgi
#
#FCGI_EXTRA_OPTIONS=
# If your application requires additional environment variables, you may
# specify them here. See PHP example below.
#
#ALLOWED_ENV="PATH"
# PHP ONLY :: These two options are specific to PHP. The first is the number
# of child processes to spawn. The second is the number of requests to be
# served by a single PHP process before it is restarted.
#
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=5
PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=500
#
# For this to work you would set
ALLOWED_ENV="PATH PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS"
Then to create the init.d file, just make a symlink to the original spawn-fcgi init.d file with the name of your conf.d file (php-cgi in my case) :
% sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/spawn-fcgi /etc/init.d/php-cgi
Then you can start it with :
% /etc/init.d/php-cgi start
and add it to the default boot level
% rc-update add php-cgi default
The only degree of freedom you have is by tweaking these two values :
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=5
PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=500
More children can handle more requests at the same time, but it consumes more memory.
Depending on your hardware configuration, adapt these two settings.