Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : Optimizing nginx for a VPS environment

[danclough]

I have a small dynamic web site (Wordpress) that I run on a VPS.net server with 376MB RAM. Web serving is the only thing the server in question does, as I've offloaded the database to another geographically separate VPS node.

I'm stuck between running Apache 2 and nginx. Apache 2 is a royal RAM hog, but nginx is painfully slow on page loads.

So, I decided to objectively test each web server by hammering them both with a 30-second siege of 15 concurrent sessions from my database server. Here are the results when serving via Apache 2:

Transactions:		         262 hits
Availability:		      100.00 %
Elapsed time:		       29.69 secs
Data transferred:	        4.04 MB
Response time:		        1.11 secs
Transaction rate:	        8.82 trans/sec
Throughput:		        0.14 MB/sec
Concurrency:		        9.77
Successful transactions:         262
Failed transactions:	           0
Longest transaction:	        1.63
Shortest transaction:	        0.86

And nginx/FastCGI:

Transactions:		         150 hits
Availability:		      100.00 %
Elapsed time:		       30.14 secs
Data transferred:	        2.56 MB
Response time:		        2.34 secs
Transaction rate:	        4.98 trans/sec
Throughput:		        0.09 MB/sec
Concurrency:		       11.67
Successful transactions:         150
Failed transactions:	           0
Longest transaction:	        3.06
Shortest transaction:	        1.10

Apache is handling twice as many transactions per second than nginx. What gives? Is nginx just not that great at serving dynamic content?

[dyna!]

Posting just the results doesn't really say much. You need to at least post the relevant worker/prefork section of Apache config and likewise the core of nginx config and the FCGI settings.

[danclough]

Apache worker:

<IfModule mpm_worker_module>
    StartServers          2
    MaxClients          150
    MinSpareThreads      25
    MaxSpareThreads      75
    ThreadsPerChild      25
    MaxRequestsPerChild   0
</IfModule>

As for nginx, I've just got the baseline config straight from apt-get:

user www-data;
worker_processes  2;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log;

    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;

    #keepalive_timeout  0;
    keepalive_timeout  65;
    tcp_nodelay        on;

    gzip  on;

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

Do you mean the FastCGI settings in nginx, or in PHP?

[fwaggle]

Post the FastCGI settings for PHP from both Apache and nginx.

Unless you're using mod_php, which would explain the boost right there.

Come to think of it, activate caching with a plugin from WP and I bet nginx hauls ass.

[travislopes]

Originally Posted by fwaggle

Post the FastCGI settings for PHP from both Apache and nginx.

Unless you're using mod_php, which would explain the boost right there.

Come to think of it, activate caching with a plugin from WP and I bet nginx hauls ass.

You definitely wanting to use a caching plugin when using WordPress and Nginx.
I had a site get on Digg and it got 60K+ viewers in about 12 hours. Server didn't crash once and pages were loading as if no one else was accessing the site.

[danclough]

WP Super Cache is installed and working, and brought nginx up to par with Apache in terms of response time.

I'm using mod_php5 on the Apache side, and I'm not sure where to go on the nginx side to see my FastCGI settings. Is that synonymous with fastcgi_param?

[devonblzx]

Most likely the fastcgi config is in /etc/nginx/conf.d/

maybe fastcgi.conf?

[danclough]

I've got this in /etc/default/php-fastcgi:

START=yes

# Which user runs PHP? (default: www-data)
EXEC_AS_USER=www-data

# Host and TCP port for FASTCGI-Listener (default: localhost:9000)
FCGI_HOST=localhost
FCGI_PORT=8888

# Environment variables, which are processed by PHP
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=4
PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=1000

[netroby]

was that true?
but at our server, seems nginx got better performance.