Chapter 6. Choosing the Right Web Server

Since it is the responsibility of the web server software to look for any incoming requests, delegate what the request is trying to accomplish to the PHP engine, and finally send a response, a portion of the measured speed of our PHP application is tightly coupled with the performance of your web server software. Therefore, we need to prevent the web server from slowing down our application by eliminating unnecessary processing.

This chapter will help you understand how a web server works "under the hood" and will help you to determine which of the major web server packages would be the best one to use for your application. We will look at the ever-popular Apache web server with mod_php, and examine some more recent newcomers—lighttpd as well as Nginx. We will be analyzing why each of the alternatives are beneficial to use, and how to install FastCGI PHP on each one. We will also look at few simple benchmarks for each server type, covering both static and PHP content.