Dan Collis-Puro

Need for Speed?
This plugin handles the wordpress/php side of a statically cached nginx-fronted wordpress (or wordpress mu) site. It makes WordPress emit an “X-Accel-Expires: 0” header when a user is logged in or has taken actions that should cause them to get a customized page on your frontend. This – along with the nginx configuration below – will ensure logged-in users aren’t impacted by your static nginx cache.
Why would you want to statically cache wordpress with <a href="http://www.nginx.org" rel="nofollow ugc">nginx?</a>
<ul>
<li>INSANE performance. Hardware that could generate 6 pages / second can now generate many thousands.</li>
<li>Low resource usage. Even on very busy servers, nginx uses only a handful of RAM.</li>
<li>Unobtrusiveness. You plop nginx in front of wordpress and that’s pretty much it. This plugin (and nginx) is all you need to make your site digg- and slashdot- proof.</li>
<li>Stability. Nginx is rock solid.</li>
<li>Faster is better. All the web gurus agree – visitors like faster sites, even when the differences are slight.</li>
<li>Do more with less. Using a frontend proxy lets you keep your heavy wordpress apaches lightly loaded, letting you handle more concurrent connections and use less RAM.</li>
</ul>
We’ve been using a caching nginx proxy at the fairly busy <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu" rel="nofollow ugc">blogs.law.harvard.edu</a> since September, 2009. The results have been dramatic: we’ve halved the amount of RAM we need, doubled our outgoing network throughput (nginx is fast!) and have had essentially no significant load spikes.
Drawbacks
There are a few.
<ul>
<li>Plugins that rely on php code running on each page view won’t work properly. This is similar to wp-supercache or any of the other static caching plugins. Stats, image rotation, etc. You should implement these features via javascript or third-party services, depending. </li>
<li>You need to install and configure an nginx frontend proxy – but see the “installation” tab. It’s really not that hard.</li>
</ul>
Notes
<ul>
<li>It is completely harmless to install and activate this plugin before you’ve got the nginx side set up.</li>
<li>YOU MUST keep this plugin activated as long as you’ve got an nginx frontend proxy active – otherwise, you’ll end up caching too much of your site, and authenticated users won’t see customized pages.</li>
<li>This plugin helps speed up access for authenticated users mainly because it makes all other traffic a negligible resource drain. I suggest installing <a href="http://php.net/manual/en/book.apc.php" rel="nofollow ugc">apc</a> (or another opcode cache) and – alternatively – a wordpress object cache. Definitely install an opcode cache – leave the object cache for later. You may find you don’t need it!</li>
</ul>
<h3>The Future</h3>
This plugin could be set up to allow you to manage caching policies entirely from a wordpress control panel. We’d do this by manipulating the timeout in the “X-Accel-Expires” header based on the type of resource that’s been requested.
It’d be nice to de-cache when pages change via some call from the backend to the nginx frontend.

WordPress Nginx proxy cache integrator

Enables your blog to work properly with an nginx frontend static proxy cache. ASTRONOMICAL performance is yours!

WordPress Nginx proxy cache integrator vs Speed Optimizer – The All-In-One Performance-Boosting Plugin