euroblaze | OXID e-Commerce User Blog

When creating B2C e-Commerce Shops, it is important to provide a high performance of online-shops.  For one thing it is important to keep an online-shop fast so that they are able to “quickly take care of business” and hence better the conversion rate.  For the other it is important to plan sufficient capacity so the the number of users/buyers can scale, even so in high-peak seasons.

The classical LAMP installation, though powerful in it’s server-side processing capabilities and features, is usually not the fastest server solution for certain types of data such as static media content such as images and videos.  Due to this OXID shops hosted on LAMP, while relying on Apache2/PHP5 and MySQL’s robust features, can benefit significantly in speed by relying on a high-performance static-content servers, such as NGINX.

There are several server configurations possible:

1. Apache and NGINX running on the same machine, the former hosting the OXID eSales application and the latter hosting only the related static content.
2. Apache running on an application server (AS) machine and NGINX serving static content (CS, Content-Server) from a separate machine.
3. Apache running on an application server, and NGINX service content from a network of content servers – a classical Content Delivery Network (CDN)

This series of articles explains how to setup OXID eSales shops in the 3 above configurations.

• NGINX for OXID eShop Images and Media Files – Part 02

Inspiration & Resources

Inspiration for this solution was taken from the following resources:

• Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site – Yahoo Developer Network
• High Performance Web Sites: Rule 2 – Use a Content Delivery Network – Yahoo Developer Network
• OXID mit Vollgas – Henrik Steffen, Top Concepts GmbH (in German)