Optimizing single low-end LAMP server using NGINX reverse proxy caching

This research aims to optimize single low-end Linux Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP) server. This kind of server usually used by newly born Indonesian startup that usually has a limited budget. We choose NGINX as reverse proxy caching for optimizing this single low-end LAMP server. The reason why we do not use NGINX as the web server, despite the fact that NGINX has better performance by many reviews, is because some popular web applications and framework only support Apache. This dependency force the startup owner to use Apache rather than NGINX as the web server. To evaluate the performance of this infrastructure, we use WordPress as the web content and then test it using two test. First, we test the server using 102 concurrent connections, then we increase it to 408 concurrent connections. Those scenarios have tested on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosted in DigitalOcean which has single 2.00 GHz CPU and 512 of RAM that cost only USD 5 per month. Experiment result shows that the proposed architecture can reduce page loading time up to 96%, saving CPU load up to 99% and saving memory usage up to 28% We conclude that using NGINX as a reverse proxy on LAMP server is a good alternative solution to optimize the performance of the web server.