UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums Resources and Customizing Admin Zone nginx or lighttpd

Anyone have any experience with either of these? I'm trying to get our site running faster and this seemed like the next move due to our heavy traffic.

yah, i turned nginx loose on a highly trafficked site and it made a big difference.

apache take 3 connections per user visit ( css js, images, php )

with nginx as an apache proxy, nginx handles 2 connections ( real fast ) and apache does the php thread.

only 1 modification needed to ubbthreads.inc.php where it handles the $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] value, so that the real IP is stored there, instead of the proxied 127.0.0.1 one from nginx.

wordpress runs great too..

i highly recommend it

also, for WHM/cPanel peeps, it has an interface there.

SD, why didn't you use nginx for the php?

because the install that i went with was compatible with WHM and it was a 15 minute chore to switch over

to go fully nginx and ditch httpd woulda been a bigger task.

it's possible, via PHP-FPM, but the ripple effect to things like awstats, webalizer and WHM in general wasn't worth it to me

i had a box with 10 domains on it and 3 ubbthreads sites on Eastern Time zones, so i could experiment in their 'night'

when it worked, i was happy.

i also went with the latest mod_pagespeed for apache and that helped a lot too..

if you have a free server to play with, i'd suggest going for the whole ball of wax, if you want

http://bethesignal.org/blog/2009/04/06/replacing-apache-with-nginx-for-static-file-serving/ <-- that is essentially what i did

another overriding reason was that i use mod_rewrite rules a _lot_ and nginx ain't up to the task ( yet ) like apache is.

essentially enough reasons for me to go with the static file proxy model

my current preference is: nginx ( static files ), apache + eAccelerator for php (fast cgi, so i don't run into file ownership probs with php as 'nobody'), mod_pagespeed, mod_rewrite

tested on 3 WHM/cPanel servers: 1 server is low traffic, 2 servers are high traffic

end result: significant performance gains

Thanks for the thorough response. You make a good point about the rewrite rules, it does appear much harder. I like 15 minutes too.

I'll check out the static file route. I'm already running apache, fastcgi php, xcache, and mod_pagespeed.

Found some interesting things in this article.
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rules_intro.html

SD, read the article, very interesting. Are there instructions out there for doing this?

Finding lots of articles on this