Setting up nginx as reverse proxy on Linux Centos 5.2 (and Plesk 9)
Following my blog article on optimizing your web server by using nginx and memcached, I'll now detail the first step: setting up nginx as reverse proxy on your server. This is going to be a bit tricky, and you'll be getting your hands dirty, so be warned. What does this consist in? Well basically, your website will be served by two daemons: nginx for the static content (images, js, css, html...) and Apache for the dynamic content. Nginx will be listening on port 80, will serve static content to visitors, and redirect any dynamic data query to Apache, running on another port -- in our case we'll be using port 8080. What is nginx? Nginx is a lightweight open-source http daemon (http server). It is said to be extremely fast, a lot more than Apache, and I have to admit by personal experience this seems to be very true. Using nginx for serving static content dramatically improved the speed of my high traffic website. Actually, some major websites such as Wordpress.com, *co...