borked

tbh, I don't know now - it was way back at the beginning of 2011. All I remember was I gave it all the resources I could and it still couldn't handle the load (watched by server-status seeing all the slots fill up, and cpu spike).
I tried it on and off for a few days until I called it quits and got dirty with apache. Honestly never looked back since.
Still, I'm not saying bad of nginx - I use it for thumbs on another server that runs at 2-500mbs (adult stuff, not an API) so that I can use apache with keepalive on for the harder processing. That combo works sweet and brought load down from ~8 to 3. Without nginx handling the thumbs, I couldn't have keep-alive on in apache.

Every circumstance is different I guess - I just wouldn't switch to nginx just cos it's what the other boys are doing... look at your situation and try both in different combinations.

Just like I love MySQL, but things were getting crazy (yes, db optimised to hell). Once I figured out where the bulk of the queries were, I moved them over to lucene/solr and shit has been plain sailing ever since. I never eliminated MySQL, but combining both "just made sense" and the server lives happily ever after.

There is no "one size fits all". A server configuration needs to adapt based on the specific requirements. That's my lesson for today ;)

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For coding work - hit me up on andy // borkedcoder // com
(consider figuring out the email as test #1)