Hi all.

I have a web site that serves banners via iframes (some html, two
images alltogether under 6 kb per request) to two high traffic sites
and several smaller sites. On average, daily peak is at 220-240
requests per second.

My average 5min machine load during that peak time is 1,7, 15min
average 0.9-1.

Server is not too powerful, dualcore AMD Athlon X2 5600+ (around 2.8
ghz) with 6 GB ram , connected to the internet via 100mbit link.

I want to switch to Nginx + PHP-FPM to reduce server load. After
switching everything to new setup (and shutting down apache), I found
that php-fpm processes are actually using less ram but more cpu (with
higher server load) then on my old setup. First thing that popped into
mind was that on Apache I had Xcache enabled, but can this alone make
such a big difference?

Can someone suggest a PHP-FPM configuration for my use case (number of
php-fpm processes, lifespan etc)?