So recently (a few hours ago) I removed apache from my server and reinstalling everything with nginx. I was told it was the better option to run multiple sites with.

So I looked up a quick little guide on how to get wordpress installed on nginx since it's what I use on almost all of my sites, and to my surprise when I had gotten everything installed I was using 420 of 720mb. I'm not really sure if this is normal since I'm new to nginx and even virtual hosting for that matter.

I used this 4 part guide to install:
http://themesforge.com/featured/high-pe ... ss-part-3/

I've never worked with nginx so any tips or suggestions?

Using 420MB out of 720MB? Sounds like you're right where you want to be. Why would you not want to use the memory that you paid for?

Besides, the tutorial that you used only promises "high performance". It doesn't promise that it will give you low memory usage. In fact, it's easy to get high performance if you just throw more memory at the problem.

What's your value of pm.max_children? Part 2 of the tutorial suggests 5, in which case PHP would use up to (5 x memory_limit) MB of memory, plus a few more MB for the interpreter itself. WordPress typically requires at least 32MB of memory_limit, and even higher if you have a lot of heavy plugins. So that's at least 160-180MB.

Also, Part 4 of the tutorial suggests a high value (128MB) for apc.shm_size -- insanely high, in my opinion. If all of that cache were actually utilized, PHP could easily gobble up 300MB of memory. Add nginx, MySQL, and a few other system services, and 420MB sounds like a reasonable result.

And this will probably give you much better performance than an Apache/mod_php setup that uses the same amount of memory. So the tutorial does deliver what it promised.

Also, are you really using 420 MB? http://www.linuxatemyram.com/

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Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)