Running PHP on Nginx - tips and tricks for high performance websites

An increasing number of websites is based on the high speed HTTP server Nginx, which has already relegated Apache to second place in marketshare among the top 10k websites. Lightweight Nginx is very powerful in serving static content, but also commonly used as a reverse proxy. Other than in Apache there is no loadable PHP module for Nginx, but it allows requests to be passed to the PHP Fast Process Manager via a fastcgi interface. But what is it that makes Nginx that fast? Is it a good idea to run PHP applications on Nginx? And what would it need to take full advantage of it? In this session we will talk about leveraging Nginx for high performance websites and proper settings for serving PHP requests efficiently.