NGINX as reverse proxy (or instead of Apache2).

[mytheory.]

Hi,

I wanted to know if anybody was using NGINX instead of Apache2? Did you get everything setup to work fine with prestashop?

We recently had increases in traffic that spikes our server resources during certain times of the day. If this spike was consistent throughout the day we would have already upgraded our server... however, we are reluctant to do so since it's only occurred recently and has not been consistent. So I've been doing some research trying to find something methods/alternatives to minimize our memory and CPU resources.

One of the things I came across was using a lighter, faster webserver like NGINX or lighttpd. Both don't seem fully compatible with prestashop and might not be great for serving dynamic content. Our apache2 setup works fine, just would like to lower it's resource usage a bit, without having to intensely modifying another setup or having to worry if future updates are going to be compatible. So basically, I don't think switching completely to one of these webservers in lieu of apache2 is a good idea (correct me if I'm wrong).

However, I came across the possibility of using NGINX as a reverse proxy to Apache2... so NGINX would serve the static content and pass all else to Apache2. My question is: has anybody set something like this up? It seems very easy to do with other basic webserver configurations. Also, would prestashop and our server resouces benefit from a setup like this?

Any input is MUCH appreciated!