So long Apache and thanks for all the fish

Apache has been good to us, and we have been good to him.
For quite a while we’ve been using Apache and mod_proxy_balancer to distribute requests to mongrels .
But, while adding a new twin server for Skroutz we had to say goodbye.

Nginx is a great replacement for apache.
It’s light, easy to configure and light. Very light. Feather light.

2215 www-data 15 0 27520 2540 752 S 0 0.1 1:14.69 nginx 2214 www-data 15 0 27688 2616 776 S 0 0.1 1:15.78 nginx 2216 www-data 15 0 27716 2692 776 S 0 0.1 1:06.48 nginx 2217 www-data 15 0 27552 2528 776 S 0 0.1 1:13.83 nginx 2218 www-data 15 0 27584 2552 752 S 0 0.1 1:04.59 nginx

Nginx takes 0.1% of memory per worker process during rush hours. That’s 20MB for the whole setup, while apache could easily take up to 7-9 MB per process and we’ve seen cases of 100 apache processes hanging here and there.

We’ve tried nginx with fcgi and php (for you php-iers) and it works like a charm.
If you have static file servers (images, etc) nginx could save you server from a lot of trouble.