02.06 Nginx vs Apache (History)

Originally Sutta Central used the Apache webserver, a suitable choice as the code was then php.

Later, Apache was delegated to mere proxying to the python cherrypy server, and serving static content.

Eventually we experienced severe performance problems with Apache, although load was not that high, even the activity of crawlers (and especially the offline build) could bog down Apache, this appeared to be an issue with persistent connections. At that point, we had the choice of trying to re-configure Apache to perform as a proxy and static-content server better, or moving to a webserver designed for proxying and static content. We moved to Nginx as webserver of choice and have since had not the slightest problem, and as a bonus the site is now much more capable of handling spikes in traffic. It is hard to be limited to one best thing, so the two best things are that Nginx uses nearly no memory at all - about 1mb, and the Nginx configuration is more elegant and straightforward than Apache's.