Dear all,

I run nginx as stand-alone webserver (not as Apache proxy) on an image gallery website. The server has to handle up to 1,200 concurrent connections on Port 80, the average number throughout the day is around 500-600. During peak times, the server suffers a bit under its load and I wonder whether there is anything that I can do to decrease the load by tuning the nginx config. I should add that Apache went nuts handling the site and therefore nginx is already a great relief to have. The site has just around 3,000 unique visitors but up to 250,000 pageviews per day.

Here are the relevant server specs:
--------------------------------------------
4 cores at 2.1 GHz
1 GB RAM (average free RAM is around 800 MB even during peak times)

Here is my current nginx.conf:
-------------------------------------

user nginx nginx;
worker_processes 8; # default: 2


error_log logs/error.log;

pid logs/nginx.pid;

events {
worker_connections 2048; # default: 1024
}

http {
include mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
client_max_body_size 64M;
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;

keepalive_timeout 20; #default: 3

gzip on;
gzip_comp_level 2;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

server_tokens off;

include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*;
}

Here are the fastcgi settings (The gallery is heavily PHP-driven):
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
try_files $uri =404;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;

I would appreciate your comments and suggestions a lot - Thank you very much in advance!

Kind regards
-A