php-fpm
Well as planned and as discussed in my previous post, last weekend we switched ogre3d.org from a dedicated server running Apache, to a virtual private server running Nginx. How did it go? Well, surprisingly well in fact. I say ‘surprisingly’ not because it was a casual throw-of-the-dice affair - I did a lot of preparation and testing - but because I’m old enough to know that nothing ever goes completely to plan, and we didn’t have any (cost effective) way to test the full server load ahead of turning it on.
Background
The Ogre3D website has been running on a dedicated server for about 7 years now; this is relatively expensive, but when we moved away from the shared hosting that Sourceforge generously provided, but which we had outgrown, our initial foray with a VPS (at the time lighttpd on Linode) proved inadequate for our needs, so after a month of futile tuning we gave up and went fully dedicated.
Time has moved on of course, and virtualisation technology is considerably better than it was in 2005. I’d intended to try again soon anyway to reduce Ogre’s overheads but our Adsense revenue was still covering the cost and I hadn’t got around to it yet. Then suddenly, Google pulled our ads after a mistaken (I believe automated) conclusion that we were hosting copyrighted material - a few users had posed test binaries of their own work on MediaFire and similar ‘red flag’ download sites - and all of a sudden we were leaking money. The misunderstanding was sorted out with Google within a few days, but even so it illustrated that we should probably look to move to a cheaper solution if we can so we have less exposure.
The Ogre site’s main issue with performance is Apache’s memory usage under load, so given a VPS is more constrained I wanted to address that. Enter Nginx, stage right.