nginx

There are many ways to use Nginx. With Aegir and Boost compatible configuration, without all that Aegir and Boost related stuff, with subdirectory install, compatible with Purl and Spaces, and many different modules, where some specific rewrites are required.

It is always handy to have something tested and working as default setup, but there is also room for improvements, different setups, and it seems GitHub fork feature would be useful to create and maintain different configuration examples for wider audience.

first of all, thanks for putting together this group, it has definitely opened my eyes to some great methods for squeezing the most performance out of a Drupal site... :)

im at the tail end of a 12 month development cycle, and have finally gotten around to setting up my hosting environment... ive taken the plunge, and after more research than i care to recall, have decided on creating and managing my own setup with Linode.com...

I've been looking at a project where I'm going to use "private files" to make sure that only certain people can download certain files. I'd heard that this method was slower, since the web server can't serve the file directly. Instead it has to go through php.

mikeytown2 and I hijacked my nginx built-in caching thread for some benchmarking discussions. Mostly Boost vs Varnish vs. Nginx caching. It needs its own thread.

My quick and dirty ab testing on my home "dedicated" server is at http://groups.drupal.org/node/26485#comment-101296 with a couple more using keepalives is at http://groups.drupal.org/node/26485#comment-101518.

Lately I have been trying to get my server to be better at performance. So far it has been going well, but the beast currently as many people know is apache. The server im running drupal on is only running drupal. So my goal is to trim it down as much as possible and only have the apache modules I need to run drupal. I am alternately considering installing nginx as it is much lighter than apache. I have been reading the drupal performance articles on 2bits.com and it has helped but i have not found many articles on trimming apache this much.

There's been some great work on the Boost module lately with a lot of functionality added, especially the pre-caching crawler. And combined with nginx's speed advantage over apache serving static files, it's a great combination.

However, nginx does have built in caching. I've never used it, but I've seen some folks discussing how to do it on the mailing list. Has anyone used it for Drupal?

While there are many Aegir related tips and documentation available, including scripts for complete Aegir system install on LAMP stack, we often have clients using Aegir the first time on their new VPS, but with enough experience to manage and transfer Drupal sites, and they often tend to overlook some required steps, they still make simple mistakes, or feel lost in a too detailed how-to, so I think it can be useful to post also some simple check-lists to make the work easier for others and to help enjoy Aegir power and

NOTE: this is an old thread, with now outdated information regarding using Nginx with Aegir. While as a standalone Nginx configuration it may still work fine, it was greatly improved in the meantime and now Nginx is natively supported in Aegir, no more hacks/patches etc. You can install (and upgrade) Aegir based on Nginx, with all enhancements thanks to available now Barracuda & Octopus installers, hosted on GitHub and Gitorious: https://github.com/omega8cc/nginx-for-drupal and http://gitorious.org/aegir/barracuda-octopus.

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The shortest answer is: YES.

Do you still use spawn-fcgi with Nginx? It's time to consider PHP-FPM.

PHP in the form in which it is available from php.net has a number of well-known issues associated with the use of the FastCGI SAPI in production. See this comparison chart of problems and how php-fpm handles them, when enabled with the FastCGI SAPI.

Features available only in PHP-FPM:

Well, I read your article about fcgid.

Let's talk about architecture of apache + fcgid and nginx + php-fpm.

fcgid and php-fpm look similar in the way they spawning processes.
Both use preforked processes of php and respawn about 1000 times of running script.

Apache and nginx both use fastcgi to call php from itself.

Hence, the difference is between apache and nginx.

As i know, apache run by default 4 preforked processes and pass request to one of its workers.
fork is the only stable model of apache in linux. http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/event.html - experimental