Thank you Apache, Greetings Nginx
Yesterday the hard drive of the physical web server that I was using for this blog decided to die. This was pretty funny since it happened within 24 hours after I predicted that my Mac was going to die before the web server.
Fortunately I had backed up my blog the day before so I didn’t lose any content. What was unfortunate though, was losing the templates that I made modifications to. Heh, guess its time for a new taste :)
This hardware failure gave me a good excuse to move away from the server that I technically didn’t own but was “gifted” by mixi (I’m now on a VPS by Slicehost). It also gave me a good excuse to upgrade WordPress which I’ve been neglecting to do for some time now.
But hey, not only I upgraded the CMS, I decided to do something different and use nginx, a Russian lightweight web server instead of Apache. I have nothing against Apache but I’ve been wanting to play with nginx for a while so it was a good time to try it out. For those that are curious, I didn’t go with lighttpd because I’ve already played with it in the past.
How’d it turn out?
If you’re seeing this blog post, it’s most likely working. That is, unless I’ve impulsively changed the http server after this entry (which is unlikely, at least in 2009).
My opinion so far is that nginx’s configuration file structure is fantastically nice. It feels like you’re actually coding something and it’s really simple. I had to do extra work to get FastCGI working with nginx (it won’t spawn a fcgi process for you) by using lighttpd’s spawn-fcgi (now a subproject of lighttpd) but nothing complicated.
This worked really well for 5 hours or so until the fcgi daemon decided to die on me… I’m not sure whether it was the daemon or PHP that caused the issue but I was too lazy to look into it so I configured daemontools to babysit fcgi for me.
So far, so good :)
