Yesterday evening I setup a new server for the website of a friend.
He doesn't know a lot about the technical site of the internet,
so I had planned to give him the usual
LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) + Wordpress setup.

Having played with Nginx with Phusion Passenger support last week,
I decided to have a little experiment with this clean new box,
that nobody would need before next week.

So instead of installing Apache I went with Nginx.

The setup was ultra easy:

• gem install passenger
• passenger-install-nginx-module
• install spawn-fcgi
• configure nginx

After this I only had to do the Famous 5-Minute Install and I was done.

Result?

• The system does everything it is suppossed to.
• The responses "feel" a lot faster than from my other servers.
• The system load is a lot lower.
• Memory consumption went down to nearly zero.

I think I'll just leave this system as is to get some long term experience.

Next stop?

Remove the toy MySQL from the equation and replace with a real database system (e.g. PostgreSQL).