More people are starting to realize that FastCGI is one of the keys to good and consistent performance (as much as PHP will allow, anyway) and are recognizing that mod_php for the disaster that it is.
So now more and more popular environments support it - cPanel gained native PHP-FPM support, and commercial shared web hosts are mostly using Litespeed (drop-in replacement for Apache httpd that is evented and invented its own FCGI-like called "LSAPI").
Not sure if I totally agree with mod_php being more efficient for a greedy host either - attaching the PHP runtime to the threaded/forked httpd request handler is very expensive.
You can set the per-pool minimum worker size to 0 with FCGI with a short keepalive, which allows you to keep a low average per-tenant memory footprint, but better performance when many requests arrive at once. That's also basically what Litespeed does.
"one of the keys to good and consistent performance (as much as PHP will allow, anyway)"
I've found that caching any results of logic that's repeated per request makes PHP pretty damn fast. I use apcu, it saves state with an mmap backed cache.
More people are starting to realize that FastCGI is one of the keys to good and consistent performance (as much as PHP will allow, anyway) and are recognizing that mod_php for the disaster that it is.
So now more and more popular environments support it - cPanel gained native PHP-FPM support, and commercial shared web hosts are mostly using Litespeed (drop-in replacement for Apache httpd that is evented and invented its own FCGI-like called "LSAPI").
Not sure if I totally agree with mod_php being more efficient for a greedy host either - attaching the PHP runtime to the threaded/forked httpd request handler is very expensive.
You can set the per-pool minimum worker size to 0 with FCGI with a short keepalive, which allows you to keep a low average per-tenant memory footprint, but better performance when many requests arrive at once. That's also basically what Litespeed does.