Yes, i just wanted an expert opinion on verifying my parameters
I felt it necessary to explain the application, environment and parameters.
Just as a follow up; i found that the pm = dynamic config i was using whilst serving OK for visitor, it seemed to be using twice the processing that a pm = static used up.
So i have switched to an entirely static allocation.
I projected that each child process consumes about 50Mb with overheads and therefore allocated 40 child processes for php5-fpm
So far so good.
I'm still getting connection reset by peer but i'm 99% sure this is people who click back or stop the load before the page finishes. As we get over 100k searches per day, 10-15 connection reset by peer errors are fine.
The only thing is, only 50% of my memory is being used so maybe i can allocate more somewhere.