I still have a few Plesk servers running Apache because I have been too lazy to move all my sites. I am so into Nginx now I was thinking about setting aside a day to get this done. So yesterday when logging into my Plesk on one of the servers the update showed a new version, 11.09 pre-release. I read the notes on it and the first thing that caught my eye was Nginx is now part of Plesk. WOW I said could it be true a Pure Nginx install for Plesk? Well no its only used as a Proxy for Apache but the claim is less memory and CPU usage with more concurrent connections, just what I would expect from Nginx.
So I updated, without errors I must say which is rare for Plesk upgrades. Comes with a new modern theme which isnt half bad. Lots of new features and of course the Nginx component which is optional. So of course I installed it immediately and all went fine, it installs version 1.30 of Nginx. Then I started seeing the problems, static files werent served properly on a few sites, like css, images, etc. Also wordpress using friendly urls showed nothing but a blank page. Well not really surprised as I figured Plesk default vhost for Nginx would be minimal and bare bones. So I was actually excited to be able to add my own configurations and test them. Would be great to post some Plesk Nginx configurations for you guys. I went over to the Parallels site to see how and where the config/vhost files are for a custom configuration. As usual Plesk doesnt make it easy but I started to set things up and will begin posting tutorials later today.
Plesk Panel 11 Linux introduces Nginx heres what Plesk details about the Nginx component.
[+] (Only for Linux) Improve web server performance with nginx 1.3. Administrators can improve the work of the web server which hosts customer websites by installing nginx, a supplementary high-performance web server specifically designed for delivering large amounts of static content. Plesk Panel 11 Linux introduces Nginx
The system will configure this server to work as a reverse proxy – nginx becomes a frontend web server that processes all incoming requests from site visitors. The requests are sent to Apache which, in turn, distinguishes requests for static and dynamic content. If a request is for a static file (like jpg, css, html, and so on), Apache passes the request through all registered handlers (applies .htaccess directory-level configuration, rewrites a URL, and so on) and returns to nginx a response which contains only a location of the requested file on the file system. nginx locates the file and sends it to the client. If the request is for a dynamic file (like a PHP script), Apache executes the file and sends the response to nginx, which delivers it to the client.
Such combination of two servers gives the following advantages:
The maximum number of concurrent connections to a website increases.
The consumption of server CPU and memory resources decreases.
Efficiency of serving visitors with slow connection speed (GPRS, EDGE, 3G, and so on) improves.
Full list of improvements in Plesk 11 here
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