Loïc Faugeron has continued his series about speeding up Symfony applications and getting the best overall performance you can. In this new post he gets into more detail about tuning a Nginx web server (with PHP-FPM) and the web server's own caching features.

HTTP frameworks, such as Symfony, allow us to build applications that have the potential to achieve Super Speed.

We've already seen a first way to do so (by turning it into a HTTP server), another way would be to put a reverse proxy in front of it. In this article we'll take a Symfony application and demonstrate how to do so using nginx.

He starts by helping you get Nginx and PHP-FPM all set up and running on a Unix-based system (installed via apt-get). He provides a simple configuration including the user to run as and a virtual host for the application. There's a few command line checks to ensure it's working correctly and a bit of benchmarking as a baseline for the performance testing later. He then gets to the caching functionality and gives some of the basics on how it works inside of Nginx itself. He includes a basic caching configuration (caching to files) and adding this to the already created virtual host. Finally he includes sample Symfony code to send the "Cache-Control" header with every request and runs the benchmarks again (resulting in about 140x faster than without the cache).