<p>I know this is not directly a programming question, but people on stackoverflow seems to be able to answer any question.</p>

<p>I have a server running Centos 5.2 64 bit.  Pretty powerful dual core 2 server with 4GB memory.  It mostly serves static files, flash and pictures.  When I use lighttpd it easily serves over 80 MB/sec, but when I test with nginx it drops down to less than 20 MB/sec.</p>

<p>My setup is pretty straight forward, uses the default setup file, and I have added the following</p>

<pre><code>user  lighttpd;
worker_processes  8;
worker_rlimit_nofile 206011;
#worker_rlimit_nofile 110240;

error_log   /var/log/nginx/error.log;
#error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log  notice;
#error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log  info;

pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;


events {
    worker_connections  4096;
}

http {
....

keepalive_timeout  2;
....
}
</code></pre>

<p>And I thought nginx was supposed to be at least as powerful, so I must be not doing something.</p>

Perhaps lighttpd is using some kind of caching?  There's a great article
here
that describes how to set up memcached with nginx for a reported 400% performance boost.
The nginx doc on the memcached module is
here
.