Three Common PHP-FPM Failures and How to Diagnose Them Without Guesswork
Most PHP-FPM outages on production servers trace back to three root causes: OOM kills from oversized worker pools, gradual OPcache exhaustion, and misconfigured per-worker memory assumptions. When the OOM killer terminates a PHP-FPM worker mid-request, the application log stays silent and Nginx records a connection reset error, making the cause easy to miss. OPcache degradation is subtler — response times climb slowly through the day as cache fills and script recompilation increases, then reset overnight when PHP-FPM restarts. A key diagnostic pitfall is checking OPcache status from the CLI, which reads a separate cache instance and reveals nothing about the live FPM pool. Distinguishing a configuration problem from a genuine capacity problem determines whether the fix is a config tweak or a more expensive infrastructure upgrade.
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