This blog is running on a VPS provided by Slicehost. It’s the 512MB package and I have no complaints. The network connectivity is pretty good too.
512MB is not what it used to be. When I run out of ram, mysql and Apache2 both go insane. My VPS becomes unusable and I end up hitting the remote hard reboot button. There is even a Slicehost iPhone app for that (which I have installed).
I can upgrade to 1GB of RAM but I’d prefer to create a smaller memory footprint. I am constantly floating between 1MB and 90MB free and adding a whole 512MB seems like overkill. Switching to Nginx is my attempt to take care of that. And besides, they have a really cool logo.
Installing it was a breeze. Go over to Donncha O Caoimh’s blog and read up on how to get WordPress, Nginx, and WP Super Cache working. I used his notes but made some changes to my installation. The only thing I did was disable the /etc/nginx/sites-available/default and created virtual server specific files. Also I don’t use WP Super Cache, I just don’t have the traffic. I started with a copy of the default file and added a few lines.
For example, blog.dembowski.net’s file looks like this:
server {
listen 80;
server_name blog.dembowski.net;
access_log /var/log/nginx/blog.dembowski.net-access.log;
# Hot-linking bad, expect when I let it.
location ~* (.jpg|.png)$ {
root /srv/www/vhosts/$server_name;
valid_referers server_names blocked none
*.dembowski.net
*.google.com
*.feedburner.com
*.pingdom.com;
if ($invalid_referer) {
return 403;
}
}
location / {
root /srv/www/vhosts/$server_name;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
# if the requested file exists, return it immediately
if (-f $request_filename) {
break;
}
# all other requests go to WordPress
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite . /index.php last;
}
}
# redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
#
error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root /var/www/nginx-default;
}
# pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
#
location ~ .php$ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /srv/www/vhosts/$server_name$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
# deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
# concurs with nginx's one
#
location ~ /.ht {
deny all;
}
}
I am lazy efficient enough that all I need to do is replace the server_name and access_log lines for each virtual web host. I tried to use $server_name in the access_log line too, but it didn’t take. That created a file name called $server_name-access.log.
Each of my virtual hosts were already setup in Apache2 this way. All I had to do was get php5-cgi working, shutdown Apache2 and bring up Nginx. I made it permament by running these commands as root:
# update-rc -f apache2 remove
# update-rc -f nginx defaults
This hasn’t really made a big difference in my memory footprint but my blog is more responsive. See this Pingdom report for performance numbers. I may yet upgrade to the next size slice.
