Nginx in WHM, what is the best option?

Installing Nginx from Easyapache

The installation of Nginx is very easy from Easyapache 4, you simply have to activate it from the Additional Packages section, then provision the change. If any flavour of Nginx (such as Engintron) is installed on the server, it should be removed in advance in order to avoid any conflicts.

After provisioning, Nginx will be active and listens on the ports 80 and 443. Apache is not fully removed, as it is used by some WHM services, and uses the alternative ports 81 and 444. Since cPanel developers have decided to offer Nginx in order to speed up Wordpress sites, the latest version is installed on the server, with php 7.3 and php-fpm.
We will use the simple benchmarking tool ab (included with every installation of Apache) in order to test the server, with 5000 requests and 200 parallel connections.

Here are the results:

Concurrency Level:      200
Time taken for tests:   225.687 seconds
Complete requests:      5000
Failed requests:        1
   (Connect: 0, Receive: 0, Length: 1, Exceptions: 0)
Write errors:           0
Non-2xx responses:      1
Total transferred:      55027324 bytes
HTML transferred:       53949353 bytes
Requests per second:    22.15 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       9027.494 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       45.137 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          238.11 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       39 4606 1622.5   4134   13121
Processing:   149 4338 1512.0   3874   11831
Waiting:       52 1607  941.7   1251    5776
Total:        188 8944 2107.4   8278   19793

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%   8278
  66%   9042
  75%   9912
  80%  10917
  90%  12141
  95%  12789
  98%  14823
  99%  15167
 100%  19793 (longest request)

Installing Engintron

Engintron is a free plugin for WHM that integrates Nginx with the other services and includes an easy to use graphical interface. The first step is to customize Easyapache in order to remove Nginx and prepare for the installation of Engintron, which can be done in a few minutes with a simple one-line command:

cd /; rm -f engintron.sh; wget --no-check-certificate https://raw.githubusercontent.com/engintron/engintron/master/engintron.sh; bash engintron.sh install

Unlike the Nginx installed by WHM, Engintron doesn’t actually replace Apache, but rather works as a reverse proxy and caching server in front of it, serving all static content and reducing overall load. This approach has several important benefits: a much higher number of requests can be served, while all Apache configuration files and modules (such as .htaccess directives or modsec rules) continue to work.

No further tweaks are needed after installing Engintron, so we will run the test again, with the following results:

Concurrency Level:      200
Time taken for tests:   201.874 seconds
Complete requests:      5000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      56359880 bytes
HTML transferred:       54552420 bytes
Requests per second:    24.77 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       8074.976 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       40.375 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          272.64 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       35 4651 1802.6   4082   10519
Processing:   352 3323 1675.6   3282   12119
Waiting:       72 1275 1086.7    945    9995
Total:        434 7974 1733.9   7304   17362

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%   7304
  66%   7950
  75%   8563
  80%   9091
  90%  10885
  95%  11909
  98%  12498
  99%  12853
 100%  17362 (longest request)

As we can notice, Engintron is slightly faster, probably because of its powerful static and dynamic caching features. In a production environment, these features could give Engintron an even greater advantage over plain Nginx. However, WHM’s Nginx also performs very well and can be a solid option for Wordpress installations, even in the current experimental status.