This article suggests that it is relatively easy to scale an application by getting lighttpd to spawn php-fastcgi instances on multiple machines. What I do not understand is this - how does a PHP script spawned on another machine get access to session variables and access a database that resides on the lighty machine? I suspect that there is more to this than the article. Would it not be a whole lot easier to simply use Gearman instead?
Perhaps it is necessary to provide a mechanism to share session variables across machines and replicate databases too? I am a novice when it comes to figuring out how to run multi machine servers so I would much appreciate any help and tips.
