It looks like I have neglected to write a new article in quite a while! Shame on me. But, thanks to a website outage, I’ve finally got some more good stuff to share with you.
My previous Nginx configuration became a nightmare to maintain and WordPress had become slower because Apache’s children were being killed by OOM. This was due to a misguided PHP cache (PHP XCache to be precise) that decided to take every available bit of memory from my system, despite having max-requests per child set low (before it was purged).
This, along with my endeavors in seeking the fastest solution to everything and the introduction of a new Cloud servers by OVH, lead me to today’s article. View Full Article »
I’ve been reading a few other blogs about how some people have implemented NginX as an accelerator for their Apache-based websites.
NginX outperforms Apache on small- to mid-range servers when it comes to static file handling, particularly because it is event driven.
The downside of NginX is that PHP can only be used with FastCGI. In general, most how-to’s explain how to implement PHP FastCGI with NginX using TCP. This is adding extra overhead and slows PHP to a crawl. A better solution is to use the UNIX sockets instead, which is explained well in Till’s blog.
But even using UNIX sockets, the PHP FastCGI and NginX combination is not as fast as Apache can handle PHP requests. For this reason, NginX can act as a great accelerator for static files while Apache deals with all the PHP requests. Even with the extra TCP overhead between NginX and Apache, this makes for quite a speedy combination.
Thinking logically, some people figured that loading static files from RAM memory instead of the harddrive must make things even faster. But that really depends… View Full Article »
