Nginx and Xenforo out of the box

[Steff]

Right first of all I've not been on here for a while... So how's everyone been?

OK I'm looking at a server setup of CentOS 6 on Nginx and MySQL

As I'm basically dumb I have no idea what the real benefits my site would have over the conventional setup below:

CentOS 6.5 on Apache and MySQLi

I'm asking because I need to know would my Xenforo (and gallery) have any significant performance increase out of the box... Or am I expected to learn Nginx to be able to get any real benefit from it.

At the moment I have about 2k visitors a day (that includes bots and guests) and on the Apache setup I'm running in to memory problems on a 2gb and although I intend to upgrade this to 4gb I want the system to use the ram more responsibly.
I've looked through the forum and it seems that the Nginx debates stopped about a couple of years ago and that is why I'm asking. Things have moved on... is this old hat now.

I'm not overly proud of my PageSpeed Insights and would like to improve on them M66/D81

 

[Jeremy P]

I think it's safe to say nginx generally has better performance than conventional Apache setups. You would need to know how to set it up, as it's quite different from Apache. You will also need to use something like PHP-FPM instead of Apache's mod_php.

If you are experiencing resource problems I would look at tuning the server. I can handle well over 200 requests per second with FastCGI caching on a single core 512mb memory server.

Improving PageSpeed scores largely depends on what it's docking you points for. If you use Facebook/Twitter/Google logins and share buttons, those are out of your control. If you've configured your server as best you can (proper expiry for static resources, gzip, etc) then I wouldn't stress over PageSpeed.

 

[Jake B.]

Take a look at CentminMod by @eva2000 Makes setup easy. Sets everything up for you for the most part, CSF, Nginx, PHP-FPM, Memcached, Zend Opcache, MariaDB, etc

 

[eva2000]

Take a look at CentminMod by @eva2000 Makes setup easy. Sets everything up for you for the most part, CSF, Nginx, PHP-FPM, Memcached, Zend Opcache, MariaDB, etc

being slightly biased, I agree

I use my own Centmin Mod LEMP stack installer to install Nginx, MariaDB, PHP-FPM and CSF Firewall for CentOS. My forums have been running Centmin Mod LEMP stack since it started - ~20 days till the forum's 2nd birthday https://community.centminmod.com And there's dozens of Xenforo forum owners who also use Centmin Mod LEMP stack these days too

Centmin Mod support forum's subforum for forum software at https://community.centminmod.com/forums/forum-software-usage.34/

If you're adventurous, you might want to try Centmin Mod latest beta instead - it's jammed packed with improvements & features compared to stable release https://community.centminmod.com/threads/centmin-mod-09-beta-branch-testing.4128/. Change log at https://community.centminmod.com/posts/17333/

 

[Steff]

Thanks for the replies. Centminmod sounds just great.

 

[eva2000]

Best advice is don't jump in the deep end with live migration. You can get a $5-10/month VPS or hourly cloud VPS from Linode, DigitalOcean or Vultr and do a test Centmin Mod LEMP install and copy test set of your forum's data to the test server to see whether or not it's for you. Takes the anxiety, stress and worry out of trying something new and lets you afford to mess up and learn as you go

 

[Ernest L. Defoe]

Or you can pay someone like @MattW to set everything up and configure it for you and then just enjoy a solid setup that works great and has few if any issues.

 

[Steff]

Thanks again for the solid advise... I appreciate all the help and advice