Aqui está o conteúdo do meu arquivo /etc/conf.d/php-cgi (é uma cópia modificada do arquivo original spawn-fcgi conf.d):
# The FCGI process can be made available through a filesystem socket or
# through a inet socket. One and only one of the two types must be choosen.
# Default is the inet socket.
# The filename specified by
# FCGI_SOCKET will be suffixed with a number for each child process, for
# example, fcgi.socket-1.
# Leave empty to use an IP socket (default). See below. Enabling this,
# disables the IP socket.
#
FCGI_SOCKET=
# When using FCGI_PORT, connections will only be accepted from the following
# address. The default is 127.0.0.1. Use 0.0.0.0 to bind to all addresses.
#
FCGI_ADDRESS=127.0.0.1
# The port specified by FCGI_PORT is the port used
# by the first child process. If this is set to 1234 then subsequent child
# processes will use 1235, 1236, etc.
#
FCGI_PORT=2000
# The path to your FastCGI application. These sometimes carry the .fcgi
# extension but not always. For PHP, you should usually point this to
# /usr/bin/php-cgi.
#
FCGI_PROGRAM=/usr/bin/php-cgi
#FCGI_PROGRAM=/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi
# The number of child processes to spawn. The default is 1.
#
FCGI_CHILDREN=1
# If you want to run your application inside a chroot then specify the
# directory here. Leave this blank otherwise.
#
FCGI_CHROOT=
# If you want to run your application from a specific directiory specify
# it here. Leave this blank otherwise.
#
FCGI_CHDIR=
# The user and group to run your application as. If you do not specify these,
# the application will be run as root:root.
#
FCGI_USER=nginx
FCGI_GROUP=nginx
# Additional options you might want to pass to spawn-fcgi
#
#FCGI_EXTRA_OPTIONS=
# If your application requires additional environment variables, you may
# specify them here. See PHP example below.
#
#ALLOWED_ENV="PATH"
# PHP ONLY :: These two options are specific to PHP. The first is the number
# of child processes to spawn. The second is the number of requests to be
# served by a single PHP process before it is restarted.
#
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=5
PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=500
#
# For this to work you would set
ALLOWED_ENV="PATH PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS"
Em seguida, para criar o arquivo init.d, basta criar um link simbólico para o arquivo spawn-fcgi init.d original com o nome do seu arquivo conf.d (php-cgi no meu caso):
% sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/spawn-fcgi /etc/init.d/php-cgi
Então você pode começar com:
% /etc/init.d/php-cgi start
e adicione-o ao nível de inicialização padrão
% rc-update add php-cgi default
O único grau de liberdade que você tem é ajustando esses dois valores:
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=5
PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=500
Mais crianças podem lidar com mais solicitações ao mesmo tempo, mas consomem mais memória.
Dependendo da sua configuração de hardware, adapte essas duas configurações.