Changes over at www.crsr.net: nginx
Posted on September 2, 2011
by Tommy McGuire
I recently read 9 million hits/day with 120 megs RAM, in which Alex Micek benchmarked his small website with blitz.io and made some significant improvements to his performance. blitz.io is very easy to use, so I pointed it at www.crsr.net and let 'er rip, with very disappointing results. www.crsr.net is a very simple, static file site that is (er, was) served by Apache, and according to blitz.io I was taking approximately 300ms to serve a request. Ick.A while back, I looked at nginx, the allegedly faster web server, and considered replacing Apache with it. But I was lazy and didn't figure that nginx would really help much. Now, though, I had some incentive. I set up nginx on port 8080, pointing at the same www.crsr.net files, and fired off blitz.io again. Nginx took a factor of ten off Apache's results, and the configuration for replacing Apache was trivial.
www.crsr.net is now being served by nginx. Thanks, Igor Sysoev! And thanks, blitz.io!