The PHP Workers are an important factor in delivering high-performance hosting for PHP-based applications. This is especially the case with WordPress, where they are used to handle all background tasks, creating web pages, querying the database, and more.
In this article, we’ll look at the importance of PHP workers, including what they are and why you need them.
What are PHP workers?
PHP-based tasks on a web server can often be resource intensive, especially for large or complex sites/applications. To help avoid delays and handle multiple requests, PHP workers are employed.
A PHP worker refers to a process or thread responsible for executing PHP code. When a request comes to a server to load a PHP page, a PHP worker takes that request, executes the necessary PHP code, and then sends back the appropriate response, for example, in the form of an HTML page.
What is PHP-FPM?
PHP-FPM manages PHP processes. Its main advantage is that it can handle a high volume of queries, making it especially useful for high-traffic sites or complex web applications.
PHP-FPM maintains pools of PHP processes that can serve PHP code without having to start a new PHP process for each request.
PHP Workers and WordPress
Here’s a breakdown of what a PHP Worker does when an uncached request is made on a WordPress website:
- A visit is made to the WordPress page.
- The web server receives that request and then forwards it to the appropriate PHP handler, for example PHP-FPM.
- PHP-FPM allocates an available PHP worker to handle the request. PHP workers load the WordPress core and any necessary plugins and themes.
- The PHP worker processes PHP code; this also involves database queries and any other required tasks.
- PHP workers generate the HTML content, which is sent back to the web server.
- The web server sends the HTML response to the user’s browser via HTTP.
- The browser processes the HTML and displays the requested page.
By combining PHP Workers with PHP-FPM (which greatly improves response times for PHP environments), your website will be delivered faster and to more people at the same time.
If a WordPress website contains poor coding and unnecessary MySQL queries, this can cause congestion for PHP workers and take much longer to load. Even a single bad plugin on a fast server can really slow down the initial page load time.
Why do you need PHP workers?
The purpose of a PHP worker is to handle requests that do not affect a website’s cached data. If the cache is missed, the PHP worker will process the request.
For example, when multiple users access a WordPress website at the same time, the web server must handle all the requests at once.
Each user’s request is processed separately and PHP workers help ensure that the website can respond to multiple users at the same time.
What happens if you don’t have enough PHP workers ?
For a fast and responsive web experience, it is essential that your website has enough PHP workers.
If a web server has too few PHP workers and receives too many simultaneous requests, it will queue up the excess requests until a worker becomes free. This can result in slow response times or wait times for users.
Each PHP worker consumes memory and CPU on the server, so there is a balance between having enough workers to handle the traffic and not overwhelming the server’s resources.
If your server frequently runs out of PHP workers, users may experience slowness. Monitoring PHP worker usage and server resources can help you make informed decisions about how to scale or optimize your server configuration.
When available PHP workers are busy, they create a background queue and this can result in:
- Slower web page loading
- Unresponsive pages
- Database slowdown
- Temporary downtime (502, 504 and other errors)
Obviously, this can cause a negative experience for website visitors and affect the website’s SEO.
PHP workers allow your website to handle multiple requests at once. This is key to maintaining a responsive user experience, especially during periods of high traffic.
Below we will look at some suggestions on how to mitigate these problems…
Optimize your WordPress code
Use quality plugins and avoid heavy themes. When choosing your plugins and themes, pay attention to how often the developer keeps them updated. If the plugin or theme hasn’t been updated in many months, it’s probably best to avoid it.
WordPress likes to keep its major versions up to date and new major versions are released frequently.
If a plugin or theme hasn’t been updated in a long time, it’s likely that it’s lagging behind WordPress core updates and is causing conflicts, leading to website performance and security issues.
Use caching
Caching stores static content that is delivered much faster and has no impact on your server or PHP workers when requested, as the web server does not need to send anything to PHP to process it and generate the page.
Without an opcode cache, PHP scripts are loaded, parsed, compiled, and executed with every request, which can be a time-consuming process.
Choose a host that does not limit PHP workers
It is common for hosting providers to limit PHP workers on their hosting plans and only increase them when you upgrade your plan.
To conclude, PHP workers play a vital role in ensuring that your WordPress website is fast and responsive under heavy load.