Nginx is a high performance web server and mail proxy server written by Igor Sysoev and a good replacement for Apache HTTPD, the market leader. Nginx is rapidly increasing its market share with major websites joining it like wordpress.com. In the June 2008 Netcraft survey LiteSpeed lost more than 600 thousand sites during this survey, while nginx gained more than a million sites; more than doubling in numbers. The WordPress blogging system recently converted all of its load balancers to nginx, using the upstream hash module to serve 8-9 thousand requests per second. We too have decided to move some of our websites to Nginx. Here are few essential tips and general guidelines for configuring Nginx. This is not a substitute for reading the documentation (rtfm). However when you are stuck even after reading and re-reading the nginx documentation then read below. You will understand the value of the tips below only then

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Nginx displays a peculiar but logical behavior when handling directories specified without the ending slash. For example you have a directory like http://www.example2.com/dir/. However you specify the url as http://www.example2.com/dir. Also assume that you have configured the server for virtual hosting and the alternative server names are: www.example.com, www.example2.com etc. and they are specified in the same order. Now when you try to fetch http://www.example2.com/dir you will instead be redirected to http://www.example.com/dir. Here is why nginx does it along with a simple solution to the rather baffling problem (ok complex problem - I said it).

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Any PHP based software like WordPress, Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, MODx etc. will serve pages both from http://your-site.com as well as http://your-site.com/index.php. This creates duplicate content for search engines, which may then decide to penalize your site for duplicate content. You can safely prevent duplicate content with the following apache code / directive added to your .htaccess file (or in httpd.conf):

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