This blog is hosted (together with mintchocolate.org) on a small VPS (1x2.8 Ghz, 256 Мб RAM, 10 Gb SSD). This VPS is shipped with apache2, php and mysql. As you can see I am using wordpress for this blog, also I have approximately 1000 unique visitors per day (half of them visit this and this articles). So it is good to have small response time.

Apache

First I need to measure how slow my blog is. I have used loadimpact.com to do that. This is result for apache2:

Apache2 stats Apache2 blog stats

As you can see load time is ~2 seconds and when I have 50 active clients load time is almost 7! seconds!

Next, I have tried an empty static page. This is apache2 with empty static page:

Apache empty page stats Apache empty page stats

Better! So, now we know ideal response time for apache. No php, no images, only static html (hello world) - ~700 ms

After this, I've decided to move all my sites on this VPS from Apache2 to nginx + php-fpm. 2 seconds is too much! 1 second is the upper limit for load time!

nginx

First of all we need to install nginx with php-fpm:

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/nginx/stable/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nginx-stable.list
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys C300EE8C
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx php5-fpm

Then change couple settings in /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf

listen = /var/run/php5-fpm.sock
listen.owner = www-data
listen.group = www-data
listen.mode = 0660

And then in /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini

cgi.fix_pathinfo=0

Configure your site:

server {
        server_name ivanderevianko.com;
        root /var/ivanderevianko.com/www;
        index index.php;

        location = /favicon.ico {
                log_not_found off;
                access_log off;
        }

        location = /robots.txt {
                allow all;
                log_not_found off;
                access_log off;
        }

        location / {
                # This is cool because no php is touched for static content.
                # include the "?$args" part so non-default permalinks doesn't break when using query string
                try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
        }

        location ~ \.php$ {
                include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
                fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        }


        location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
                expires max;
                log_not_found off;
        }
}

And now, results for this configuration:

nginx blog stats nginx blog stats

As you can see it is twice faster that with apache! And now we can handle 50 active connections without any problem. Incredible!

Conclusion

apt-get remove apache2