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Near the top of your Apace config file you'll find about 40 LoadModule directives.
Those load up various modules so you can do all kinds of nifty things with Apache.
mod_speling, for example, automatically fixed typos in URLs. Most of those modules
are things you'll never use in your life, and all of them make the server slower.
If this server is serving only thumbs, not running the PHP, probably 38 of those
40 modules can be commented out and the server will be MUCH faster - up to the
point where your network connection is the bottleneck. The top 2 to comment out
if you aren't using them are mod_php and mod_perl. Both are big, powerful modules
and by being big they slow things down.
There are several other configuration directives to tweak too.
The initial idea for nginx looked promising, but I'm not at all impressed with it.
The idea was to make a very small, fast web server, making it fast by leaving
out 96% of the features that a Apache has. Well, people wanted more features,
of course, so they were added, and now nginx doesn't perform any better
than Apache does if you simply don't load unneeded modules. nginx and a bare
Apache are extremely similar, but with Apache when you need to add a feature
later you simply uncomment the relevant module. With nginx, the feature simply
isn't available, period.
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