httpwebwitch - 6:44 pm on Feb 3, 2011 (gmt 0)

I discovered that:

yes, Nginx will run PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager), which they claim to work just like yer vanilla PHP that plays nice with Apache. Getting that working is "easy" (in air-quotes), as long as you can decipher the geekspeak and twisted instructions for which the Linux blogosphere is reknowned.

Some have gotten Wordpress to work on Nginx, and have blogged about it. HOWEVER, the standard WP install (the famous one-minute install) does not do the job. After installing WP, there's a pile of reconfiguration that needs to be done, particularly with all the URL rewriting that makes WP tick.

So, it's possible, but far from trivial.

The additional work involved in getting PHP to work, then getting WP to work on top of that, convinces me that right now is not the time I want to be experimenting with Nginx. I'll save that exploration for a different project.

I haven't been experiencing any performance problems on my current server; it's a nice fat dedicated VPS with plenty of RAM. But I'm slowly migrating to a rackspace cloud instance, and I was curious if I could get the same good performance with Nginx - on a smaller machine with less memory and CPU. Doing more with less, so to speak.