Nginx vs. Apache

Just made the switch

[Andem]

Since I'm being forced to move hosting, I decided to give nginx a while during my testing-phase on a couple of new servers. I was pretty impressed and decided to bring it live today and saw a slight improvement in performance with only a few configuration modifications.

Has anybody else here made the switch? What has your experience been?

Cheers

[Andy Langton]

From my experience, it really depends on what you're serving. I've found serving lots of static files via nginx far exceeds apache performance, but YMMV ;)

[Andem]

Here's my experience thus far with a forum running vBulletin 3.8.x:

Switched from 1 dedicated server for images and CSS and 1 dedicated server for dynamic content with databases. Both Apache servers were optimized for the content they served and both had logging turned off for anything static.

I've now moved static content* and dedicated content to the same server that was formerly hosting only dynamic content**. I have made the necessarily optimizations for static content and made some adjustments to the default nginx conf along with some customization to php-fpm.

Here are the immediate results:

Load average has literally dropped like a brick on the single server running RHEL 5. Pages seem to load faster and many members are pleased with the speed improvements.

A pretty good indicator of this can be seen below:

Google Webmaster Tools Graph [imageshack.us]

I'm extremely pleased with the results of the switch over. I'm still getting used to some of the features of nginx but it is light years ahead of Apache 2.1 and page loading times for each and every single web site hosted now with nginx have seen either medium-to-dramatic improvements.

* Content was and still is optimized for speed following several published guidelines: compressed image sprites, minified css/js, proper use of cache headers, .
** Still hosted on separate subdomains and IP addresses.