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Configuring and Compiling Nginx and PHP-FPM on Ubuntu for Magento, Part 1

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So, Magento is a huge piece of modular and extensible PHP code. Each request takes a lot of CPU cycles and memory to kick out a Magento page. This means it is slow. The performance of Magento is a frequent complaint, and rightfully so: consumers won’t wait around all day for an ecommerce store to load. They will bail out and try another store if a page doesn’t load in just a few seconds. A default Magento 1.3 install on budget web hosting can have page load times of up to 10secs, which is unacceptable.

So what can be done to speed up Magento?

There are a number of things. I have tried almost all of them at this point. And I did reduce the page load time greatly, at least on the front end. But all of the AJAXy scripts on the backend (which has no caching, as far as I know) meant store maintenance and order fulfillment remained a tedious process. So I decided to try one final thing: make the switch from trusty old Apache to Nginx.

I did have Apache2 tweaked out and running quite fast, but Apache has a big memory footprint (especially when running mod_php), and this Magento install is on a 256MB “slice” in the Rackspace Cloud so I want to keep the amount of RAM needed to run the store as low possible without sacrificing performance. Nginx is a really lightweight web server, and when paired with PHP-FPM (“FastCGI Process Manager”, a patch for FastCGI) supposedly it’s the fastest and most memory efficient way around to serve up PHP scripts. Sounds like just what I need!

I got Magento running on Nginx with PHP-FPM and APC and it runs about as fast as my Apache install. I was hoping for a miracle and didn’t get it, but considering it’s on an anorexic little 256MB Cloud Server I would say it is performing admirably. Perhaps with more time to tune the performance (and bumping up to a bigger slice) it would really be fast, but I worked a long time on the previous Apache install so it was a tough act to follow. This article is the first of three that will explain what I did to get Magento running on this stack.

DISCALIMER: I am a pretty serious linux n00b. I’m sure I installed unnecessary packages, added extra compile flags, and what have you. You might bork your server trying this stuff, so don’t do it in a production environment!! However, I did get Magento running on Nginx with PHP-FPM and APC. It was a struggle, but I did it. So I thought I would share my notes in hopes they will help others. I do not claim that these same commands will work for you in your unique environment, and I probably won’t be help troubleshooting when they fail. Also, please add a comment and correct me if anything is wrong here, or if there is a better way to do anything. Thanks!

Here are some of the resources I used to figure this out the first time around:

And here is the start of the compile and install process (note: you might need to sudo these commands):


# aptitude install make bison flex gcc patch autoconf subversion locate libc6 libpcre3 libpcre3-dev libpcrecpp0 libssl0.9.8 zlib1g lsb-base
# mkdir ~/sources
# cd ~/sources/
# wget http://sysoev.ru/nginx/nginx-0.7.63.tar.gz
# tar -zxvf nginx-0.7.63.tar.gz
# cd nginx-0.7.63/
# ./configure --sbin-path=/usr/local/sbin --with-http_ssl_module
# make
# make install
# ln -s /usr/local/nginx/conf /etc/nginx
# /usr/local/sbin/nginx
# kill `cat /usr/local/nginx/logs/nginx.pid`

Then, I created the following init script at /etc/init.d/nginx.


#! /bin/sh

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: nginx
# Required-Start: $all
# Required-Stop: $all
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# Short-Description: starts the nginx web server
# Description: starts nginx using start-stop-daemon
### END INIT INFO

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
DAEMON=/usr/local/sbin/nginx
NAME=nginx
DESC=nginx

test -x $DAEMON || exit 0

# Include nginx defaults if available
if [ -f /etc/default/nginx ] ; then
. /etc/default/nginx
fi

set -e

. /lib/lsb/init-functions

case "$1" in
start)
echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile /usr/local/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid \
--exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS || true
echo "$NAME."
;;
stop)
echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile /usr/local/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid \
--exec $DAEMON || true
echo "$NAME."
;;
restart|force-reload)
echo -n "Restarting $DESC: "
start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile \
/usr/local/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON || true
sleep 1
start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile \
/usr/local/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS || true
echo "$NAME."
;;
reload)
echo -n "Reloading $DESC configuration: "
start-stop-daemon --stop --signal HUP --quiet --pidfile /usr/local/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid \
--exec $DAEMON || true
echo "$NAME."
;;
status)
status_of_proc -p /usr/local/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid "$DAEMON" nginx && exit 0 || exit $?
;;
*)
N=/etc/init.d/$NAME
echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart|reload|force-reload|status}" >&2
exit 1
;;
esac

exit 0

Now we can easily start and stop Nginx with familiar commands like /etc/init.d/nginx start. To install the init script, do the following:


# chmod +x /etc/init.d/nginx
# /usr/sbin/update-rc.d -f nginx defaults

You should have Nginx compiled, installed, and running now. Yay! Next, Part 2 will be about installing and compiling PHP-FPM. Finally, Part 3 is about setting up Magneto with Nginx and PHP-FPM (including mod-rewrite issues). I will not be covering the other aspects of setting up a Magento server like MySql and sendmail, because these are the same for an Apache stack which has plenty of documentation out on the Internet already.

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