Entries Related to ‘Nginx’

In my last article I showed you how to set up CentOS, nginx, and MySQL to optimize your WordPress installation. That’s a great start, but there’s more you can do. Here we’ll set up PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager), WordPress itself, and Varnish Cache, a web application accelerator.

WordPress is easy to set up and use, and well supported by both its community and professional consultants. WordPress depends upon a complete stack that comprises an operating system, database, web server, and PHP. If you can optimize this stack, you can enhance the performance of your site. Here are some tricks and best practices for a setup that will improve your throughput without forcing you to upgrade your hardware.

Installing and maintaining a secure web server on Linux can be a challenge. It requires in-depth knowledge of Linux, Apache, and PHP server-side options. One of the main problems is to find the balance between security and productivity and usability. The best solution depends on the specific project requirements, but all installations share certain common characteristics. Here are some best practices for securing a LAMP server, from the server configuration to fine-tuning PHP settings.

Apache is a reliable HTTP server that still holds more than 65% of the web server market, according to Netcraft. Unfortunately, Apache was not designed with performance or scalability in mind. While alternative solutions might be more efficient, switching is not always the best option. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have other alternatives to improve your web server’s performance.

Do you have problems serving more than two pages per second on your WordPress or Drupal blog? Do the sites of your competitors serve pages faster than yours? Their secret weapon may be a different web server and PHP combo than Apache and mod_php. But don’t worry – you can turn to one of these alternative solutions too, and improve your web server throughput without upgrading your hardware resources.