nginx and virtualmin

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#1 Thu, 06/13/2013 - 10:02
edwardsmarkf

nginx and virtualmin

hello all -

what is the thinking of switching over to nginx?

besides the obvious learning curve (which i dread) has anybody ran into any significant disadvantages or problems?

conversely, do the advantages so far outweigh the disadvantages that its well worth it?

i started posting this in the newbie forum, but decided the subject may be too advanced.

Thu, 06/13/2013 - 18:36
Joe
Joe's picture

The advantages primarily come down to resource usage. nginx is small.

Are you running out of memory? If so, nginx might help.

Are you having problems with performance due to low memory? nginx might help.

There are some disadvantages. nginx support is still quite new in Virtualmin (been around for a couple of years, but only started being heavily used in the past six months). Apache has been in there for nearly a decade, and Virtualmin has tens of thousands of Apache users. It's definitely a more predictable/safe/reliable/documented choice.

There are also some limitations of nginx. nginx doesn't support CGI apps, for instance, which rules out some of the Install Scripts found in Virtualmin Professional. There are also some more advanced hosting features missing in Virtualmin (I'm not sure what's still missing these days...probably aliases and stuff are weaker). It gets better over time, based on what active users need, but there's a whole lot of stuff you can do with Apache that you can't do with nginx (easily) in Virtualmin.

I'd really have to just recommend you try it with some of your sites on a test server and see how it works for it.

It probably won't be a miraculous performance boost (apps are usually the limiting factor, not the web server), but it might free up some resources which can make things work faster.

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