Nginx as webserver for 1 website and apache for another. Is it possible

Apache2nginxweb-server

On a VPS with centos panel I've Apache as webserver and Nginx as reverse proxy.

I've heard that the second is faster than Apache to handle PHP requests and I'd like to configure it as WebServer for 1 website, but I still need Apache for another one.

Is it possible?

My goal is to speed up the serving time of php pages. For example wp-admin/admin-ajax.php takes 7 seconds to render!!! I would expect 0,5 seconds.

Best Answer

AFAIK you can't have two processes listening on the same port (80/http) on one machine, so probably not in parallel as such.

However you could have Nginx listening on port 80, Apache listening on another port (81), and have Nginx pass applicable requests to Apache. Each would then pass the request off to wherever it needs to go, PHP for example. However this is probably very similar to what you have now, so I'm not quite sure it's what you're looking for.

Perhaps if you describe your setup and goals a little more fully we could help more.

Update PHP being slow is unlikely to be with the web server. You'll need to look at the resources used, dig into the code, check logs, and see what's going on. You can use Nginx Page Caching or Microcaching for rapidly changing websites to massive increase the speed for anonymous users. Caching reduces server load so also reduces page generation time for logged in users.

PHP isn't the fastest language around, though if properly resourced it's ok. HHVM is another PHP interpreter that's faster than PHP5, but I found it didn't work well for Wordpress with the plugins I use. PHP7 is faster, but again I had trouble with some plugins.

You've said it takes 7 seconds to render the page. Have you done a test using something like webpagetest.org to determine what part of the page load is slow? It can help tell you if it's page generation, dependent resources, etc.

You should also consider a CDN, such as CloudFlare, which has an effective free tier.

Related Solutions

Nginx – How to Set Up as a Caching Reverse Proxy

I don't think that there is a way to explicitly invalidate cached items, but here is an example of how to do the rest. Update: As mentioned by Piotr in another answer, there is a cache purge module that you can use. You can also force a refresh of a cached item using nginx's proxy_cache_bypass - see Cherian's answer for more information.

In this configuration, items that aren't cached will be retrieved from example.net and stored. The cached versions will be served up to future clients until they are no longer valid (60 minutes).

Your Cache-Control and Expires HTTP headers will be honored, so if you want to explicitly set an expiration date, you can do that by setting the correct headers in whatever you are proxying to.

There are lots of parameters that you can tune - see the nginx Proxy module documentation for more information about all of this including details on the meaning of the different settings/parameters: http://nginx.org/r/proxy_cache_path

http {
  proxy_cache_path  /var/www/cache levels=1:2 keys_zone=my-cache:8m max_size=1000m inactive=600m;
  proxy_temp_path /var/www/cache/tmp; 


  server {
    location / {
      proxy_pass http://example.net;
      proxy_cache my-cache;
      proxy_cache_valid  200 302  60m;
      proxy_cache_valid  404      1m;
    }
  }
}

Nginx – Which is faster at serving up PHP pages, Apache or NGINX

Personally, I think nginx provides the right split between the things it does itself (receiving and processing HTTP requests) and what it delegates to other processes (dynamic page generation). Whilst it is less effort to setup Apache to serve PHP requests, running everything within Apache is a bit of a security and configuration problem (all files that are accessed by all scripts run by all users on the server must be readable/writable by the user that Apache runs as, meaning that one user's PHP scripts can look at the data of other users); running each PHP site as it's own user in it's own FastCGI context is a much better option (at the cost of slightly more up-front configuration until you've got your site creation automation dialled in to do the right thing).

As far as "faster" goes, Apache with mod_php will probably be faster on a single request, as long as the machine isn't resource constrained (passing to an external FCGI listener and then back isn't quite as quick). However, Apache is much fatter (especially when running with mod_php), so you'll be able to serve more traffic with nginx before needing to upgrade to a bigger box.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Nginx – How to Set Up as a Caching Reverse Proxy

Nginx – Which is faster at serving up PHP pages, Apache or NGINX

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