Until a couple days ago, I thought nginx was just another webserver, and was too busy to investigate. But, in reading over the past couple days, it seems the main benefit of nginx over Apache is that it will handle a heavy load on limited hardware better than will Apache. I seem to recall something about memcached being easy to set up and use on nginx, but can't find the page where I thought I read that (is it true?).

I have downloaded and installed the latest nginx to my Ubuntu 12.04 server on Sunday (and have just left it at the default configuration, for now).

I saw, in the config files lots of material for PHP, on FastCGI, but I have found no reference to using FastCGI with perl. Nor have I found reference to configuring a cgi-bin directory for plain ol' Perl cgi scripts (i.e. scripts not written with FastCGI in mind). I have a lot of perl scripts, not FastCGI, and work a lot on Apache. I need to know, first, if nginx and Apache can share document root and cgi directory trees, and second, if nginx will execute my perl scripts as they are, or do I have to rewrite them all as FastCGI scripts (that would involve a huge cost in my time). If nginx serves only static content, where is the benefit for me, as I have no static content (except for whatever is static in Wordpress, which I would install at some point).

Next, I need a pointer to documentation with info about configuring nginx to support SSL, or, better, TLS; especially creating my own CA (actually, don't need help with creating a CA and using it to make other certificates, as I am comfortable with use of openssl - but it is more a question of where to put them and how to direct nginx to use them), which is used to create and sign server certificates and client side certificates, and making checking of client side certificates optional (and using the presence or absence of a client side certificate to control accessibility to certain content on certain pages-not all).

Thanks

Ted