Here at BitFlip we have been in the process of migrating from a managed host in Chicago to our own unmanaged server in Atlanta. This has given us the flexibility to set up the system exactly how we want from the ground up. We knew we could achieve better performance than our managed host's LAMP stack with our own LEMP stack, but the difference in performance is staggering. See below for the benchmark results!

Old Server Config:

• Apache 2.2 mpm-prefork
• MySQL 5.0
• PHP 5.2.11 via SuExec + CGI

New Server Config:

• Nginx 
• MySQL 5.0
• PHP 5.3.3 via FastCGI (PHP5-FPM)
• APC OpCode Caching

The tests were performed with ab (Apache Bench) from the old server. The latency between servers is 33ms.

Capacity:

• Old Server: 24.37 requests/sec
• New Server: 2024.21 requests/sec
• 8,206% more capacity

Speed:

• Old Server: 410.328ms
• New Server: 115.206ms
• 256% faster

So not only can the new server handle over 82x more traffic, it can do so while being nearly 3x faster!