As well as that cPanel writes the conf files so it would require changing the vhost templates which actually is possible now. At this point though I do not know what all cPanel still plans to add to their templates so I don’t think it’s a good idea having a non standard template yet.

What I think the best setup is would probably be mpm_worker with fastCGI, however for a shared environment it’s not the best setup. It’s however what I use when it’s a single site or a few sites where several waiting php threads for various sites is not too much of an overhead.

I’ve tried running mpm_worker with suPHP, however I think something is funky with worker thread handling and the PHP scripts being executed. At random some scripts end up not killing themselves so over a few days you may have 100 PHP processes eating 40MB of ram and not doing anything. This can obviously be problematic. We ran it for a bit and apache was able to serve a lot of requests but we were stuck killing php processes every few days to keep the ram usage down. With mpm_prefork it has it’s own share of problems surprisingly. We’ve noticed that it does not suffer from the PHP CGI scripts not dying issue, however it likes to create a process that for whatever reason stops taking requests which our automated systems pick up and restart apache.

Seems you just cannot win…

reference http://mpm-itk.sesse.net

That really helped allot – thank you