I’m going to outline the process of switching from Apache’s default installation of MPM Prefork to that of MPM Worker. I will also be covering the proper installation of FastCGI (mod_fcgid) to further improve your server performance. This guide is ideally intended for individuals running on low-memory VPS servers as memory consumption will likely be far lower with the Worker MPM because it spawns threads as opposed to forking child processes. If you’re intentionally reading this article, you’re probably aware of the performance benefits gained.
The worker MPM uses multiple child processes with many threads each. Each thread handles one connection at a time. Worker generally is a good choice for high-traffic servers because it has a smaller memory footprint than the prefork MPM.
