Which PHP Mode should I choose for SMF?

[User2]

Hello.
On my virtual hosting, in the site settings there are three PHP modes:
1) CGI
2) Apache module
3) FastCGI (Nginx + PHP-FPM)

Which of these modes is best for the SMF forum?

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Depends on the actual configuration really, they should all work, they just work differently.
I would probably go for either FastCGI or Apache module.

[Arantor]

Which is best depends primarily on how busy your forum is and whether you need htaccess support or not.

SMF does not depend on htaccess support by default so either Apache module or FastCGI is good.

If you plan on using Pretty URLs or any of the various snippets around the forum for htaccess files, go with Apache module because I doubt your host is doing any clever proxying to get best of both worlds. (That would require effort and tuning, two things your host appears not to have bothered with.)

[User2]

I don't use anything else on my virtual hosting except the SMF forum.

[Arantor]

I didn't ask about that, but that's good to know.

[Illori]

i believe the general response is that if you are hosting your own server you should be more an expert at running servers and managing a webserver. if you are not an expert you should look into a managed server instead.