But BlueCoat has an amazing appliance that sits in this niche very nicely. I have used several of these over the years and their capabilities and features are hard to beat.

Sorry for the comerical plug. I don’t often recommend a commercial product if I can help it, but this company and their product are top notch.

Also, while a little off topic, they also have a great content filter solution free for home use. It is called K9

The advantage of nginx isn’t purely from a speed perspective. I did some rough testing myself before I wrote the blog post linked to, and I did see some increase in speed when running ab on one desktop against my own requesting a static image (50,000 times, scaled concurrent connections up in tests from 1 to 50), even on multiple repeats of the benchmark.

What is the most important benefit to me as a sysadmin is how lightweight it is, regardless of the number of connections. Unlike apache that uses more and more memory and resources, nginx and lighttpd remain nice and small. The more load a server is under the more the advantages of nginx type browsers come to matter. It means that I can get that much more out of a web server cluster than I could before for very little effort.

It’s also worth thinking about what occurs with the pages you’re loading on your server, and considering the ratio of static to dynamic content on a site. On typical sites if you were to run something like these you’ll find there often aren’t that many dynamic calls, at least in relation to static. I’d definitely agree with you, in an ideal world I would split up static and dynamic content between sub domains, then have the appropriate webserver listening on appropriate ports/IPs for them. It’s much more elegant.
Sadly isn’t always an option, particularly in my particular line of business. I work for a web hosting company, and I help design and implement custom solutions for customers. Trying to explain the need to split up content in different locations can often be tricky.

There is an interesting blog here where someone demonstrates how they link nginx in to “WP Super Cache” so that if there is cached content that gets served straight away by nginx instead of proxying requests through to Apache.

Ive tested nginx vs apache for php in the past. I did not do extensive testing but nginx in my tests consistently had faster page loads and higher throughput in apachebench.

Thanks for enumerating those options. I think 3 looks like the best solution for my actual application, but I’m interested in playing with nginx more just to see what all the fuss is about

I’ll let you know once I implement one of them. Heck, I’ll probably post it here!

Some alternative ideas to try out …

1) Assuming you have another IP to burn, run apache and nginx side by side. Have one (or multiple) subdomains pointed at nginx for your static content such as images, pdf’s. If you spread the static across multiple subdomains, you might be able to trick browsers into making parallel requests to speed up render times.

2) If you don’t have another IP to burn, you can perform a similar trick using nginx as a reverse proxy. Have nginx handle static files by itself, and reverse proxy non-static stuff to a apache (note, you may need mod_rpaf to fix your logs).

3) Run your scripting language out of mod_fcgid. This works *really* well with PHP and mpm-worker Apache, as long as you can live with the limitations of PHP as a FastCGI (no PHP directives in .htaccess files is the big one — you can get around that by having an intelligent php.ini and/or overriding in code). This way, static stuff is handled by Apache as a thread, without bringing the overhead of PHP where it’s not needed.

I’ve built more than a few Option 3’s in high load hosting environments, and I’ll be building a combo option-1-and-3 solution Real Soon Now ™.

Ping me if you try one of these options out; I’d like to know how it turns out.

Allthough I’m pretty loyal to Mozilla corp and Firefox, I can’t say I haven’t been thinking of checking out what else is on the market.