HHVM with Nginx fastcgi not working properly

Question

I would like to use HHVM via Nginx. (Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS, PHP 5.3.10)

I've followed the steps mentioned here:
http://www.hhvm.com/blog/1817/fastercgi-with-hhvm

This is how my Nginx setup looks:

server {
        listen  80;
        server_name demo1.dev
        server_name_in_redirect off;
        root /var/www/demo1;
        location / {
                index index.php;
                try_files $uri $uri/ @handler;
                expires 30d;
        }
        location @handler {
                rewrite / /index.php;
        }
        location ~ .php$ {
                fastcgi_keep_conn on;
                if (!-e $request_filename) { rewrite / /index.php last; }
                expires        off;
                fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
                fastcgi_param PHP_VALUE "error_log=/var/report/PHP.error.log";
                fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
                include        fastcgi_params;
        }
        location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
                expires 1y;
                log_not_found off;
        }
}

I have a file called hhvm.php that contains this:

function is_hhvm() {
    return defined('HHVM_VERSION');
}

if (is_hhvm()) {
    echo "HHVM is working\n";
} else {
    echo "HHVM is not working\n";
}

What am I doing wrong and how can I see if HHVM is working properly?

UPDATE: Output of: ps auxf | grep hhvm

root     15164  0.0  0.0   9360   660 pts/0    S+   13:55   0:00                          \_ grep --color=auto hhvm
www-data 15142  4.2  6.3 576564 122484 ?       Ss   13:54   0:01 /usr/bin/hhvm --config /etc/hhvm/server.hdf --user www-data --mode daemon
www-data 15154  7.0  6.3 580668 122636 ?       Ss   13:54   0:01 /usr/bin/hhvm --config /etc/hhvm/server.hdf --user www-data --mode daemon -vServer.Type=fastcgi -vServer.Port=9000 -vPidFile=/var/run/hhvm/hhvm-fastcgi.pid

Answer 1

Everything looks right. Can you try using php-fpm with the exact same ngingx config and see if it works? Maybe you have a directory permission issue or something. Also make sure you are actually starting the hhvm-fastcgi process using /etc/init.d/hhvm-fastcgi start and that nothing was listening on port 9000 before you ran that. You can run ps auxf | grep hhvm to make sure it is running and listening.