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If you started reading this article it means that you are interested in finding more about the NginX web server. The big monsters fighting the web server battle are still Apache and Microsoft’s IIS. These types of software are very good and complex, but the better they are the more resources they consume. Apache for example is great for its modularity and its increased optimization possibilities. But every module costs you RAM which, in the end, costs you money. So what do you do when you have a handful of small servers with software like Drupal or WordPress or maybe a small photo gallery with Gallery2? All these examples are PHP based platforms. Apache handles them very well, but it creates an instance of the process itself for each request made to it (you can find out more about the default mod_prefork module here). This means that if you have 10 concurrent users on your websites you will have 10 Apache processes (not counting the ones that are kept alive from the previous sessions). The PHP module in Apache (mod_php) consumes the most resources out of them all, and the worst thing is that it does not make a difference between static and dynamic content. In the end a small VPS server with let’s say 512MB of RAM will easily be overwhelmed by even a small amount of traffic on your site.

As of July 22nd 2010 PHP-FPM is a part of PHP 5.3.3 core's trunk. FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some useful additional features. In this tutorial I will compile NginX 0.8.47 and PHP 5.3.3 with FPM, MySQL, Suhosin, APC and Imagick on Ubuntu 10.04.

I will not explain how to configure NginX here. You can find a lot of resources about that on the nginx wiki or my previus post Install NginX with PHP-FPM in Ubuntu 10.04.

My previous article explains how to install Tomcat 6 in Ubuntu and deploy the Apache Solr application. If you preffer to deploy it under Jetty, the following steps explain how to install jetty and prepare a multi coresetup of Solr:

Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites.

If you want a web server with a very small memory footprint then you should think of trying NginX. It's very light weight and in some situations it performs much better than Apache (like serving static content). Many websites, use it as a frontend to apache, so that all the static content is served by NginX and the rest is proxied to a backend Apache. It can also handle php files by itself with the help of fast-cgi, spawn-fcgi or php-fpm. Php-Fpm is not as mature as Apache's mod_php, but it performs about the same.

So now let's install NginX with a php-fpm proxy.