Nginx, Fastcgi, PHP, rewrite config for Drupal

handelaar,

Thanks for putting this information out there. We're looking at getting our own server and consolidating all of our Drupal stuff onto it as well as some misc traffic. Would you mind providing the hardware configuration of the server (RAM, disk(s), CPU(s), etc) as well as the type of traffic you get (hits per day/week/month whatever)? We're trying to figure out if a Celeron would do us to start or do we need something higher powered and if so how much more do we need.

Your time putting this together is appreciated.

Right under this page on a Google query for nginx rewrite examples, Scott Yang draws my attention to the part of the nginx docs which I couldn't see staring me in the face.

Where Apache uses !-f then !-d in sequence, I was looking for a way to ape it. Turns out I didn't need to. So above where I wrote this:

...you should instead use this...

...because Nginx has the "-e" directive which matches against a file, directory or symlink all at once, rendering my attempts to replicate the Apache way unnecessary.

handelaar, thanks for the information on your server. Based on the fact that most of our sites will be running semi-static content (i.e. usually updated by us and not the users) I think we'll be okay with a lower end box.

As an aside I ran some performance numbers using http_load and the difference between Apache2 and nginx was pretty dramatic. Granted this isn't completely an apples to apples comparison but I did do some tweaking with both to get the numbers more inline but nothing too drastic. This was on a fresh Debian Stable install using a 'as delivered' from Dell Precision 360 w/1GB of RAM and a 3GHz Intel P4 inside my local network where both machines were connected to a Linksys WRT54G. Also I repeated this test several times to verify the results were consistent. The Drupal install was the latest 4.7.X branch with 7 pages set up and referenced in the urls.txt file.

Server: Apache2
Apache2 caching=On
Drupal Caching=On
$ http_load.exe -parallel 50 -seconds 30 urls.txt
547 fetches, 50 max parallel, 3.62053e+06 bytes, in 30.015 seconds
6618.88 mean bytes/connection
18.2242 fetches/sec, 120624 bytes/sec
msecs/connect: 122.124 mean, 3250 max, 0 min
msecs/first-response: 2337.75 mean, 5016 max, 141 min
HTTP response codes:
code 200 -- 547

Server: nginx
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=6
PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=250
eAccelerator=On
Drupal Caching=On
Browser Load Time = 1
$ http_load.exe -parallel 50 -seconds 30 urls.txt
2748 fetches, 50 max parallel, 1.83063e+07 bytes, in 30.015 seconds
6661.68 mean bytes/connection
91.5542 fetches/sec, 609905 bytes/sec
msecs/connect: 6.52766 mean, 3265 max, 0 min
msecs/first-response: 215.662 mean, 3625 max, 0 min
HTTP response codes:
code 200 -- 2748

I'm still playing around so I'm sure the numbers from nginx will only get better.

I added

Here's a Debian-style init script for starting and stopping the PHP FCGI instances. The one thing it doesn't do is clear the environment like the original does. You could probably interleave env into this somehow to get it to do that, but I didn't go that far on this first pass. Note that, as with any use of start-stop-daemon and --background, you don't get much error checking on startup.

If you're using the imagecache module, serving static files directly like the original poster does, nginx bypasses the image rescaler. In order to make image cache work with the following,

you need to add the code below to force the imagecache images through PHP. My code assumes that your imagecache image dir is set up under /files/imagecache.

Current Drupal site: Inventor Spot

I am not able to get the rewrite working correctly...

Without the rewrite rule all works as expected. (No rewrite but the main site shows, just no links work because of no rewrite)

When I have the rewrite section in my conf file, I get no CSS, pictures, just straight text with a darn funny looking white page.

Here is what I have in my conf file:

===============================================
# serve static files directly
location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico)$ {
access_log off;
expires 30d;
break;
}

if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
break;
}

error_page 404 /index.php;

location ~ \.php$ {
include /usr/local/nginx/fastcgi.conf;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:57102;
fastcgi_index index.php;
}
===============================================

Very strange indeed as it seems like the above would work. When I comment out the rewrite section the home page displays fine but just not rewrite (as expected).... As soon as I put that rewrite section back in I get the page with straight text, no css formatting, no pics, etc.

ANYONE have any ideas? Spend all day on trying to figure this out and I am completely stumped.

The shell script as shown above did not work for me. (Debian Etch circa 5/2008). I had two issues:

1. It did not spawn anything.
2. When I tweaked it some more, I got it to spawn a parent, but no chldren.
3. When I finally got it to spawn, there is another issue where the user account that started the script (not www-data) owned the process and threw permission errors.

So, I revised the punchline of the script a bit. Instead of:

if test x$UID = x0; then
EX="/bin/su -m -c \"$PHPFCGI -q -b $FCGIADDR:$FCGIPORT\" $USERID"
else
EX="$PHPFCGI -b $FCGIADDR:$FCGIPORT"
fi

I used sudo with as few modifications to /etc/sudoers as possible. If you spent some time modifying /etc/sudoers, you could probably come up with a more elegant approach:

if test x$UID = x0; then
EX="sudo -u www-data env PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=4 $PHPFCGI -c $PHP_CONFIG_FILE -q $
else
echo "Sorry, can't start. Must start as root"
fi

Pay careful attention to the "env..." bit. This allows the php5-cgi to make children. To run multiple versions of php, I added the $PHP_CONFIG_FILE stanza as follows:

##DIRECTORY to *find* the php.ini
PHP_CONFIG_FILE="/etc/php5/cgi"

I still have a problem where the listener dies with peak loads. php5-cgi sucks all of the cpu up and then dies. I don't care about the cpu running near 100%. it seems like it can't queue very well. Does anyone have any experience with nginx instance as load balancer to multiple php5-cgi listeners?