nginx is a powerful and modern HTTP server. It is perhaps most commonly used as a reverse proxy, also known as a load balancer or front end proxy. It follows the UNIX philosophy of doing one thing, and doing it well, and as such, it relies on several helper daemons to become a full-featured web server such as Apache. For example, to serve PHP, it relies on php-fpm to do the processing, while nginx itself handles the caching and speaking the HTTP protocol itself. In this article, we will talk about common configuration options, and how they relate to it’s performance. We’ll also discuss some basic administrative tasks.