fastcgi

On CentOS, php-fpm can be easily installed via CentALT yum repository. This requires epel repository too and will pull down any dependencies if needed.

• Install EPEL release:
  
  rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
• Install CentALT release:
  
  rpm -Uvh http://centos.alt.ru/repository/centos/5/x86_64/centalt-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
• Install via yum:
  
  yum --enablerepo=CentALT --enablerepo=epel install php-fpm
• Look through and edit /etc/php-fpm.conf . The config options are well commented... also available at php-fpm.org
  
• The default settings should work quite well.
  
• Bring up the service via:
  
  /etc/init.d/php-fpm start

I've had php4 running with apache2 for a while now and wanted to get php5 also simultaneously running. There are other ways to do this, but I opted with getting php5 to run as fastcgi and keep php4 as apache2 module so they can co-exist together.

This was done on CentOS release 4.5 with ISPConfig Control Panel on a dedicated hosting scenario. If you're looking to share the server with others then you might want to set up with suphp/SuExec for security purposes.