Currently in production:
A (ve) Server 1 GB from Media Temple, running nginx 7.67 and php 5.3.3 (php-fpm).
Hosting a Magento eCommerce site with only a few hundred visits per day.
Must support SSL.

Currently testing with:
A (ve) Server 512 MB from Media Temple, running nginx 8.54 and php 5.3.3 (php-fpm).
Nginx compile options here (includes realip in case that matters): http://pastie.org/1517082

Even with the small amount of traffic, my production server is frequently timing out (5 sec) on page loads. I've tried tuning it, and seem to have gotten the memory and CPU usage to a pretty stable place. Query profiling seems ok, etc. Therefore, I want to set up caching, but am incredibly confused.

I installed Varnish and got it running, however Nginx continued to listen on port 80 no matter what I set the listen directives to. As far as Nginx's built-in caching options, I'm lost. I don't understand the difference between fastcgi_cache and proxy_cache, and though I've read through the documentation it hasn't been enough for me to figure things out. I also read a bit about nCache, and how it is now a part of Nginx. I don't know where to start.

I don't want to proxy to Apache. I want to use Nginx as my primary/only web server. I'm not sure if I need to use the upstream/downstream directives since I want everything to take place on a single server.

Further, apart from looking at Firebug, I'm not sure how to tell if anything is working. With Varnish, it's obvious because Firebug will say that Varnish is serving a file. But if I'm trying to do everything with Nginx, how can I tell if things are being served efficiently or just normally? I'll also need to be sure that dynamic content for logged in users is delivered appropriately.

Can someone please help me make sense of this? Thanks!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2011 11:57PM by rsskga.