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Hello Gary,

the server specialist is Nicholas which is currently out of office and he will be back next week, I will ping him about this ticket, but I don't when he will able to take a look at it.
The only suggestion that I can give you is to check the amount of write/reads your server can support: Akeeba Backup and Kickstart will stress the system since they will read/write a lot of files in a very short time frame.

The question is framed wrong. There is nothing in your server configuration which can affect ONLY our software and nothing else on your server. Either everything suffers or nothing. My guess is that you have a performance impact on everything, you just can’t see it because 1.2 seconds versus 750 milliseconds is less noticeable than 5 minutes instead of 3 minutes, even though the percentage difference is the same.

If your server was really using PHP FPM you should not have a performance drop. FPM stands for FastCGI Process Manager. The server creates a bunch of PHP threads which uses when a request comes in. Since there is no PHP startup time (the threads are preloaded before the request handling) it’s as fast as the Apache module SAPI without the limitations regarding which is the effective user the site runs under.

What you are describing sounds more like the behavior of PHP FastCGI or PHP CGI where a new PHP process is started per request. This does have a performance impact.

If this is not the case there are other reasons.

If I recall correctly, FPM can communicate either by TCP or shared memory / named pipe with Apache. Going through TCP may incur a performance penalty due to firewalls or simply because of the latency of the TCP stack.

PHP FastCGI / FPM would have a different php.ini file than the Apache module. Maybe you previously used OpCache or another code cache and now you don’t?

Also, are you on the same server or did you move to a new one? Different servers, even if they are just different virtual machines on the same host, may have vastly different performance profiles.

Finally, is your server running on Windows? Based on my experience, Windows and FPM is super slow.

However, none of that is specific to our software and I’m just speculating since I’m not your server admin. Ask your server admin to profile the execution of PHP applications before and after and figure out how to fix the performance issues. After all, that’s literally their job :)

Ah, I see why you got confused but that's not quite the case. Admin Tools DOES ΝΟΤ any kind of special configuration to work with NginX. Out of the box it works just fine. However, Admin Tools has three optional features:

• .htaccess Maker for Apache and Litespeed servers (an anything else which understands .htaccess file)
• NginX Conf Maker for NginX. Since NginX does not support per-directory / live parsed configuration you need to integrate its output to your host configuration which is very likely why you got confused.
• web.config Maker for IIS

You can only use one depending on which web server you are using for your site. These features are similar. Each one creates a site configuration file which protects and optimizes your server.

You don't have to use them to use Admin Tools. They are just another layer of protection. Admin Tools doesn't make any of that layer of protection possible, it just makes it easier to set up without having to know the gory details of how these configuration files work.