How To Speed Up Drupal 7.7 With Boost And nginx (Debian Squeeze)

This tutorial shows how you can speed up your Drupal 7.7 installation on a LAMP stack (Debian Squeeze) with the help of Boost and nginx. Boost provides static page caching for Drupal enabling a very significant performance and scalability boost for sites that receive mostly anonymous traffic. Boost makes sure that your logged-in users always get fresh content by not caching pages for logged-in users. In a first step I will show how to make your site faster by enabling Boost on a normal LAMP stack (Apache2, PHP, MySQL), and in a second step I explain how to make your site even faster by using nginx as a reverse proxy sitting in front of Apache and delivering the static HTML pages cached by Boost. nginx delivers static files a lot of faster than Apache and uses less memory/CPU.