When I started programming in PHP, my hosting setup involved a cPanel installation with Apache and MySQL. This has been the de facto standard for many PHP developers and for the most part I don’t think any of that needs to change. I simply never had to deal with websites that got more than 10,000 visits a day. This all changed when I started work at my current job a few years ago. We sell an educational product that serves a predictable 15,000 requests per minute for 10+ hours/day, every day. Instead of Apache, we use nginx with PHP-FPM to handle this traffic. This is becoming a very popular setup for many companies with non-trivial traffic, but I have also found success with it in my small 256MB Ram VPS. For various reasons, nginx does a better job with memory and concurrent connection handling than Apache. In this post, I want to talk about some of the reasons you might want to go with this setup.
For those that do not follow php internals, believe or not APC will probably be phased out with PHP 5.5 as Zend has volunteered to open source their Optimizer+ which has a slightly faster opcode cache.<p>Mixed emotions about this.