海浪家园

Time is money. This somewhat shallow and overused saying fits perfectly well into any on-line business. Users are impatient and every millisecond brings them closer to leaving your website.

If you’ve ever been trying to squeeze more out of hardware you must have come across Nginx (engine x). Nginx usually appears in context of PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) and APC (Alternative PHP Cache). This setup is often pitched to be the ultimate combo for a web server but what that really means? How much faster a PHP application is going to be on a different web server? I had to check it and the answer as often is – that depends.

I benchmarked three different types of PHP software:

– Large application based on Zend Framework 1
– Small PHP script
– WordPress

The software was hosted on Amazon EC2 large instance. All benchmarks were run from EC2 Tiny instance to be as close as it possible to the web server.

To make sure I benchmark web servers instead of disk I/O I set all logs to go to memory (/dev/shm). PHP sessions were directed to memcached.
Both servers were using Zend Optimizer Plus with opcache.revalidate_freq set to 1 hour. I use Zend Optimizer because APC wasn’t stable for me with PHP 5.4.x.
If you aren’t familiar with PHP accelerators they convert PHP scripts into byte code and keep them in shared memory. That brings significant boost of performance (40-90%) because PHP scripts don’t have to be read from a disc and parsed on every request. Using the accelerator helped me removing I/O from the equation.

It’s very important to make sure Apache won’t read .htaccess. You can achieve it by setting Allow Overwrite to none. Parsing htaccess in real time will drop performance on the Apache side. It’s recommended to not use this file in production environment. Continue reading »