Will an Nginx as reverse proxy for Apache help on dynamic content only

Question

I am planning to move all my static content to a CDN so on my server I only have dynamic content left. I now have Nginx set up as reverse proxy to Apache. The static request tha

Answer 1

What I've done for one website is :

• set up nginx as a reverse proxy in front of Apache
• configure it so :
  • Requests to PHP pages (i.e. dynamic content) are sent to Apache
  • Requests to static files (CSS, JS, ...) are directly served by nginx.

This without having to set up two domains : all is on the same domain.

Basically, what I've done is :

• serve images from nginx, without gzip compression, with caching
• serve js/css (i.e. text files) from nginx, with gzip compression, with caching
• serve some other extensions (pdf, exeutables, ...) form nginx, without compression, without caching
• pass the other requests to Apache

Here's how my nginx's configuration file looks like :

server {
    listen   80;
    server_name  MY_DOMAIN_NAME;

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/MY_DOMAIN_NAME.access.log;

    gzip on;
    gzip_comp_level 2;
    gzip_proxied any;
    gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss application/xml+atom text/javascript application/x-javascript application/javascript;

    location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico)$  {
        root    /home/www/MY_DOMAIN_NAME;
        #access_log off;
        gzip off;
        expires 1d;
    }
    location ~* ^.+\.(css|js)$ {
        root    /home/www/MY_DOMAIN_NAME;
        #access_log off;
        expires 1d;
    }
    location ~* ^.+\.(pdf|gz|bz2|exe|rar|zip|7z)$ {
        root    /home/www/MY_DOMAIN_NAME;
        gzip off;
    }


    location / {
        proxy_pass   http://MY_DOMAIN_NAME:8080;
        proxy_redirect     off;

        proxy_set_header   Host             \$host;
        proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP        \$remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For  \$proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_max_temp_file_size 0;

        client_max_body_size       10m;
        client_body_buffer_size    128k;

        proxy_connect_timeout      90;
        proxy_send_timeout         90;
        proxy_read_timeout         90;

        proxy_buffer_size          4k;
        proxy_buffers              4 32k;
        proxy_busy_buffers_size    64k;
        proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
    }
}

Now, why do such a thing ?

Well, nginx is supposed to :

• Need less memory
• Be faster
• Be able to handle more connections

So, I suppose it could help on a website with a bit of traffic, to lower the load that's put on Apache.