One of my servers is running Fedora + Nginx + php-cgi (spawned). I noticed sometimes php-cgi crashes without a reason or warning (Nginx gives out 500 error), and I have to spawn it again.
After some digging, I find exporting PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS to ENV cures the problem. As advised, I export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN as well.
To achieve that, in detail, just add the following to the top of spawn bash script.
# Set these two env variables to reduce php-cgi crash
PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=1000
export PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=5
export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN