![\"nginx-wp-love\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/djcp\/files\/2010\/01\/nginx-wp-love.jpg\" "\\"nginx-wp-love\\"")
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The short version:<\/strong><\/p>\n We put an nginx caching proxy server in front of our wordpress mu install and sped it up dramatically – in some cases a thousandfold. I’ve packaged up a plugin, along with installation instructions here – WordPress Nginx proxy cache integrator<\/a>.<\/p>\n The long version:<\/strong><\/p>\n Here at blogs.law.harvard.edu,<\/a> our wordpress mu was having problems. We get a fair amount of traffic (650k+ visits\/month), – combine that with ‘bots (good and bad) – and we were having serious problems. RSS feeds (we serve many from some pretty<\/a> prominent<\/a> blogs.<\/a>) are expensive to create, files are gatewayed through PHP (on wpmu), and letting PHP dynamically create each page meant we were VERY close to maxing out our capacity – which we frequently did, bringing our blogs to a crawl.<\/p>\n WordPress – as lovely as it is – needs some kind of caching system in place once you start to see even moderate levels of traffic. There are many<\/a>, many<\/a> high quality and well-maintained options for caching – however, none of them really made me happy, or fit my definition of the “holy grail” of how a web app cache should work. <\/p>\n In my mind, caching should:<\/p>\n So I decided to put a proxy in front of wordpress to static cache as much as possible. ALL non-authenticated traffic is served directly from the nginx file cache, taking some requests (such as RSS feed generation) from 6 pages\/second to 7000+ pages\/second. Oof. Nginx also handles logging and gzipping, leaving the heavier backend apaches to do what they do best: serve dynamic wordpress pages only when needed. <\/p>\n A frontend proxy also handles “lingering closes” – clients that fail to close a connection, or that take a long time to do so (say, for instance, because they’re on a slow connection). Taken to an extreme, lingering closes act as a “slow loris”<\/a> attack, and without a frontend proxy your heavy apaches are left tied up. With a lightweight frontend proxy, you can handle more connections with less memory. Throw a cache in the mix and you can bypass the backend entirely, giving you absolutely SILLY scalability.<\/p>\n On nginx – it’s so efficient it’s scary. I’ve never seen it use more than 10 to 15 meg of RAM and a blip of CPU, even under our heaviest load. Our ganglia<\/a> graphs don’t lie: we halved our memory requirements, doubled our outgoing network throughput and completely leveled out our load. We have had basically no problems since we set this up.<\/p>\n To make a long story short (too late), I packaged this up as a plugin along with detailed installation and configuration info. Check it out! Feedback appreciated: WordPress Nginx proxy cache integrator<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The short version: We put an nginx caching proxy server in front of our wordpress mu install and sped it up dramatically – in some cases a thousandfold. I’ve packaged up a plugin, along with installation instructions here – WordPress … Continue reading \n