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#18916 NginX re-visited

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Latest post by sheepshead on Monday, 27 January 2014 08:24 CST

Sunday, 26 January 2014 12:50 CST

sheepshead
 Tach
Here is the illiterate Dutchman from Germany again. On November 28 last year I closed the ticket on the subject below-

> I saw that more configuration opportunities now exist for nginx. Can you advise an illiterate how to deal with that please?



I would suggest NOT enabling NginX. There is no support for .htaccess in NginX and every small or big configuration change requires you to edit the NginX configuration and restart the server. This is the fastest way to brick your site if you don't know what you're doing. I would recommend sticking with Apache.



Thank you for the advice Nicholas- I surely will adhere to it.

The special offers section was an excellent resource for me to find the "good guys" in all aspects of web publishing and I feel very comfortable now with the plans that I committed myself too. The support will be there, if I stumble.

Thanks- I will close the ticket


What I meant with the remark "I found the good guys in your special offers section", was the offered 3 months trial period at Siteground. I did move three sites geared to the US market to their server in Chicago and already decided to stay there for another 3-to 9 months. They sure want to please and it feels good being there although I think they are pretty pricy. They also provide decent tutorials and exciting presentations like the one here on slideshare by their CEO Tenko Nikolov. http://www.slideshare.net/siteground/speed-new-jdnlfinal
Ok- second part of story-
Following that move- I ditched my Strato VPS server, but those guys persuaded me to try another more powerful Plesk based VPS and I transferred my remaining 5 sites to that thing. The server was pretty bare, but I used Tenko´s presentation to install Modpagespeed, enabled the MySQL cache, installed memcached (all pages run on that) and opcode for PHP (APC) At this point my pages from Berlin load faster than the pages hosted in Chicago on my client in South-Germany and things have been running stable for several weeks now.
Having done all that- and having written this here- do me a favor please and have a look at slide 73 of the presentation.
Dont you think, Nicholas, that for a webserver admin or webmaster this is not like dangling a bratwurst before a dog car or a juicy carrot before a rabbit-waggon?
That little extra mile HAS to be gone if performance is further improved as Tenko is stating. Siteground uses Varnish and some home-grown stuff, but Plesk offers Nginx and PHP-FPM pre-installed which should work equally well. Since I do not consider myself totally illiterate anylonger- but lets say am half way to becoming a smart-ass, I am sure I could get the .htaccess issue resolved also. There seem to be plenty of tools and guidance on the web on the subject.
But reason for writing all these words here- why dont you as our champion-smart-... take charge here and support that for a fee? I am sure the demand would be there and would personally feel much more comfortable with that (and not have to spend all that time on the issue)

Monday, 27 January 2014 04:39 CST

nicholas
Hello Fas,

Hosting is far more than setting up the essential software on the server. It's also about server monitoring, optimisation and preventive measures against hackers. SiteGround does offer all of that, which is why I recommend them.

Now, you live in Germany and you compare the access time between a server located in the other side of the globe (Chicago) and a server located in your back yard (Berlin). TCP packets travel over the network at 0.9c (90% the speed of light). Going roundtrip to Chicago takes a good 190msec, whereas for a roundtrip to Berlin I'd be damned if it took you over 30msec. That's for every packet. When these are added up you get a significant speed difference. Ask SiteGround to move your site to their EU servers (I think it's Amsterdam?) and you'll see a big difference.

Also, regarding NginX vs Apache, I'll still take Apache every time of the day for someone who doesn't have a Server Ops team. NginX is HARD to configure. The equivalent of Admin Tools .htaccess Maker-generated .htaccess for NginX does exist and it's free of charge. Please read it. See all this "Change to match YOUR system" bunch and the "PHP Setup" section? This is exactly why I can't create an NginX Configuration Maker. These sections are 100% dependent on your server. Unlike .htaccess you can't exclude them and expect the resulting file to work. It won't. It needs a server administrator to figure these out. But if someone is at that level then the file I linked you to is far more than enough to let them create a customised nginx.conf file: they don't need the GUI I can write.

I'd say this. If you think you've got what it takes, try your teeth on the master NginX configuration file I linked above. If you can make it work, congratulations, you can use an NginX server. If not, you need to go back to Apache and yes, do enable the Varnish cache. As you see in Tenko's slide, the difference between NginX and Apache+Varnish is less than 4%. Of course he doesn't give us the confidence level of his benchmarks, so we'll have to assume a typical 3% statistical error margin. Do you understand what this means? The speed difference is around 1-2% of 0.01 seconds = 0.01 * 0.01 seconds = 0.0001 seconds = 0.1 msec. I'd say that it's far less than negligible. It's a laughable difference.

So here are you choices:
1. NginX. Marginally faster, extremely difficult to configure.
2. Apache + Varnish. Marginally slower, extremely easy to configure.

The choice is yours :)

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Monday, 27 January 2014 08:24 CST

sheepshead
Hi Nicholas-
The case you bring is rather compelling and a no-brainer. Initially I had Varnish mentally put in reserve position, since I had picked up on the web that it conflicts with mod_pagespeed. I just have been reading up on that issue and learned that since vs 1.6.29.3 that should not be an issue any longer.
Since as a retired finance guru, web publishing is subordinated to my main activity - learning and writing about regenerative cells and medicine, of course I will take your suggested easy way out.
Cannot imagine getting bored and try my luck with nginX- at least not in the intermediate future.

Thanks for the comprehensive answer and your time

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