Please include nginx rewrite rules for apache users

After doing some testing, I found some interesting results.

If you let nginx handle all incoming connections and just proxypass php files to apache, pingdom.com was showing load times of 1.8 -> 2.2 ms – which is really good.

However, I decided to add in the following config to see what would happen

# Set a variable to work around the lack of nested conditionals
         set $cache_uri $request_uri;

         # POST requests and urls with a query string should always go to PHP
         if ($request_method = POST) {
            set $cache_uri 'no cache';
         }
         if ($query_string != "") {
            set $cache_uri 'no cache';
         }

         location / {
            try_files /wp-content/cache/page_enhanced/$host/$cache_uri/_index.html $uri @backend;
         }

@backend is my block that handles passing php requests off to apache for processing.

This is what pingdom.com shows now : http://i49.tinypic.com/2ngzif4.png

The difference is night and day! The blog pages load instantly – no more ~1.5 sec pause before the content displays.

So if your running a similar setup (nginx up front, apache backend) you should really mess around with the ‘try_files” directive and get it to check for the static resource first.