On Thu, 2010-08-05 at 19:40 +0400, Igor Sysoev wrote:

Raina, my 2 cents below...

It depends on your application and needs. There is no magic bullet in web-performance world.

Small site / big site, audience location, content sizes, numbers of linked static files, etc etc etc, hardware bottleneck, operating system, network connectivity, redundancy & failover needs, everything is very much different for every project.

For average small site (let's say 10000 pageviews/day) differences between Varnish and nginx will be almost identical. Remember that Varnish created to keep as much stuff in memory as possible, and nginx is based on OS internal things to provide performance.

I'm not sure about internals of each project and how they work under Linux vs FreeBSD servers. This could be a decision reason too.

Don't forget about backend and application optimization too. There is usually lots of improvements too. If you want to reach peaks of performance you should probably consider benchmarks on every workflow that your users go through and see how fast your backend code is.

Alex.