On the Inviqa techPortal site today they have a new post from Barney Hanlon in his "Speedy Sites" series. This time he looks at using nginx to speed up your PHP applications.

In the previous article in this series, we looked at using Apache with mod_pagespeed to perform on-the-fly enhancements to decrease page load times. Getting an optimised page is only half the battle however; we need to ensure that our backend is doing as little work as possible in order to be highly scalable. In this article, we look at how we can achieve this while improving performance – all with nginx.

He starts with an introduction to nginx for those not familiar with this alternative web server and how it integrates with PHP. He walks you through the installations and configuration of a basic setup and running some benchmarks with siege. Finally, he shows how to enable PHP support on the install via the "php5-fpm" package (FastCGI).