reverse proxy vs. stand-alone

[Cliff Wells]

On Fri, 2009-05-15 at 09:19 +0400, Igor Sysoev wrote:
> On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 05:36:15PM -0700, Cliff Wells wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2009-05-14 at 20:24 -0400, jemari wrote:
> > > Hi everyone,
> > > 
> > > I am setting up a small VPS. My plan is to have nginx as a reverse
> > > proxy to apache2 (running with mod-php). All other static files will
> > > be served by nginx.
> > > 
> > > Does anyone know if there would be a significant difference in
> > > performance and/or stability if I removed apache, and have nginx use
> > > fcgi for php?
> > 
> > Yes, you'd save hundreds of megabytes of RAM by not using Apache, which
> > will undoubtedly affect performance in a positive fashion.
> 
> Would not these megabytes go to php/FastCGI ?

Not really.  PHP under FastCGI seems to use a lot less resources than
mod_php.   I assume this is because the number of threads is a constant
with PHP under FCGI.  

I converted a Joomla site from Apache/mod_php to Nginx/FastCGI and went
from constantly consuming the full 256MB (and crashing the VPS) to using
only around 20MB of RAM.

Regards,
Cliff