If he's pushing massive amounts of bandwidth, just having nginx in
front can help free up the apache slots, as apache only has to stay
open long enough to send its result to nginx, rather than stay open
long enough to handle the entire connection for the end user. that
could be a double edged sword / backfire however if the data being
sent is larger than the size the apache slot would typically be, but
if not it would be a help there. and it sounds from what was said that
the cache module has helped quite a bit as well. if you are dealing
with static content read from disk, then using nginx's single threaded
architecture is especially better suited to that compared to using
apache. 600megabit of streaming or downloads would just fall over and
die with apache, especially if the per stream rates started to suffer,
the number of apache slots to support that would soar.

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 8:01 AM, jeff emminger<jemminger@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> mod_balancer
>>
>> We're not using mod_balancers, we have two dedicated servers running
>> LVS. LVS load balances requests to nginx which sent the request to
>> apache / php on localhost.
>>
>>
>
> I'm just curious as to why putting nginx in front of it all allows
> apache+php to handle the load, when it seems to be handling the same
> requests (for the php) as before.