Optimizing PHP-FPM Performance for WordPress on Virtualmin 7.30.8

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Dear Virtualmin Community,

I am working to enhance the performance of a WordPress site hosted on a Virtualmin server, set up in March 2025, to improve page load times for a small business blog. While the site functions adequately, I seek to optimize PHP-FPM configuration to reduce response times and better handle concurrent users. Your insights would be greatly appreciated.

My server, running Virtualmin 7.30.8 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, operates on a VPS with 4GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, and Apache 2.4.52, hosting a single WordPress domain. The site, averaging 1,000 daily visitors, uses PHP 8.1 with PHP-FPM, configured via Virtualmin > Edit Virtual Server > Services > PHP-FPM Configuration.

I followed the Virtualmin documentation to install WordPress and enable PHP-FPM, setting a dedicated pool with default settings: pm.max_children=10, pm.start_servers=2, and pm.max_requests=500. Monitoring via Virtualmin’s System Statistics shows average page load times of 1.2 seconds, but during peak traffic (approximately 50 concurrent users), response times spike to 3 seconds, and CPU usage approaches 80%.

To address this, I increased pm.max_children to 15 and adjusted pm.max_spare_servers to 4, which slightly improved performance but introduced occasional 502 errors under load. I reviewed Apache error logs (/var/log/virtualmin/[domain]_error_log), which indicated no specific PHP-FPM failures, and confirmed sufficient memory allocation via Webmin’s System Information.

I also enabled OPcache through Virtualmin’s PHP Options and verified its functionality, yet the performance bottleneck persists. I am particularly interested in fine-tuning PHP-FPM parameters or exploring additional optimization strategies to ensure consistent response times under varying traffic conditions.

What specific PHP-FPM configuration adjustments or optimization techniques would you recommend for a WordPress site on Virtualmin 7.30.8 to improve performance and stability?

Thank you for your expertise and guidance.

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I would be willing to wager the problem has nothing to do with PHP, and instead is something pathological in the database usage of one of your plugins. Adjusting PHP configuration is almost certainly just wasting your time and distracting you from the actual problem. Disable plugins until you find that one that is making things stupid slow, and never enable it again…find an alternative that isn’t insanely wasteful.

I say this because you have 1000 visitors per day? That could be served by literally any computer made in the past three decades without even breaking a sweat, it’s ridiculous that it could cause problems on a modern server, even a tiny VM. Something really silly is happening if you’re running into performance problems. So, stop whatever silly thing is happening (probably a very poorly implemented plugin) and your problems will go away.

Finally, this looks like it may have been generated by an LLM, and we’ve gotten a lot of weird, seemingly automated, “help me improve WordPress performance” posts lately…I’m becoming extremely suspicious of them, and on the verge of banning everyone who does it. Since this feels like an unrealistic scenario, about a topic that has seen a bunch of posts that seem machine generated, I’m keeping a close eye on this and this account. Posting LLM-generated content is prohibited, as it is usually a prelude to spamming.

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This has come up in the past. There are sites that already are more WP specific and list improvement tweaks that users here seemed to have believe helped.

This software suite helps you get a server up and running using some pretty safe defaults. If you need it more fine tuned, that is the area of others.

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Dear Joe,

Thank you for your insightful feedback and for highlighting the likelihood of a plugin-related issue over PHP configuration. I appreciate your candor and understand your caution regarding automated content. I assure you my inquiry stems from hands-on troubleshooting for a genuine WordPress site, and I’m committed to following community guidelines.

Following your suggestion, I disabled three of the seven active plugins on my Virtualmin 7.30.8 server, hosting a WordPress site with 1,000 daily visitors. Deactivating a caching plugin reduced page load times from 3 seconds to 2 seconds, per Webmin’s performance logs.

Thank you for your guidance and vigilance in maintaining the community’s quality. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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This should not be the case, caching plugins should make things run better as it prevents a lot of repeated PHP and SQL lookups. There might be a setting issue in the cache plugn? I am using W3C Total Cache.

  • What plug-ins do you have installed?
  • I would start debugging WordPress.
  • How much memory do you have assigned in your php.ini? Setting the right amount of workers is important but so is configuring your php.ini correctly
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name and shame

it might help others with the same problem’’

or to get help from others who have fixed/improved it.

(not really something for this forum, doesn’t WP have a similar help desk?)

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What are these?

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Methinks we’re wasting our time trying to “help” a hallucinating LLM.

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Yeah, I also think it’s odd.

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This repetition…

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Hello, I just created an account to hopefully add some sense into the oddness of this post.

This may sound random too lol but I, as many people, use AI tools from time to time like CHATGPT and others.

I’ve been recently working with Grok myself, and I notice that when I ask something and it’s coming up with an answer, it shows you things that it’s doing like “searching example . com for this information” and so on.

Call me crazy, but I’m sure one of the things I’ve seen it do is “posting to ___ forum for possible help”, so is it possible that there are actual AIs posting in behalf of users?

Crazy times we’re living huh :slight_smile:

PS: amazing work with Webmin / Virtualmin! Thank you so much!

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Oh god. It would be Musk’s demonic spawn that would be the innovator in being remarkably evil in simultaneously poisoning the web and exploiting volunteer labor and wasting their time.

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