Just for the sake of sticking with the rules...

Hi, I'm Gwyn, and I'm mostly familiar with virtual worlds like Second Life and OpenSimulator, which I tend to blog about, writing long essays. This is actually my field of academic research.

A year ago or so, my sharing provider (where I have some 110 sites for non-profits and personal use...) was facing a huge increase of CPU load as well as a DDoS. Being a sharing provider without a SLA, they did not much to improve the situation. My most important blogs literally grinded to a halt, even though they had a lot of caching (and CloudFlare on top of it). So, armed with a VPS from LeaseWeb and another from VPSget (never throw all eggs in the same basket!), I started to look at nginx as an Apache alternative (Apache would simply eat too much memory and CPU cycles to work properly inside a tiny VPS). I was never a huge Apache fan, I just used it like pretty much everybody else because it has been available for so long :)

This lead me to investigate nginx further and start getting acquainted with its configuration. The result of my early attempts of getting it to work with several WordPress installations, some of which multisite, and playing nicely with caching plugins like W3 Total Cache, made me write an article about it: http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/wordpress-multisite-wordpress-nginx/

Since then, I've switched pretty much everything on my own servers to use nginx. Currently I'm playing around with ISPConfig3 over Ubuntu and using nginx to provide superfast performance on more odd applications like ownCloud, Seafile (both are open-source Dropbox clones), Gallery3, and so forth. This is often challenging because most attempt to get these working under nginx use very old configurations full of "ifs" and often miss some of the more complex Apache rewrite rules. But slowly and patiently I plod along the information and get them to play nicely with nginx as well :)

The rising usage of nginx — now the second most used web server in the world after Apache — encourages me to continue to learn how to tweak it and to help application developers to support it as an alternative to Apache. And that's why I'm registering here on the forums :)

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I'm just a virtual girl in a virtual world...