I think one of the less obvious conclusions here is how important caching is for wordpress, both with nginx and apache. I wish this test also covered W3 Total C

I think one of the less obvious conclusions here is how important caching is for wordpress, both with nginx and apache. I wish this test also covered W3 Total Cache though. I know it's hard to test all possible permutations. One of the biggest issues with wordpress in particular however, is that whilst it can run with nginx happily, it is written primarily with Apache in mind. And many plugins rely on it too. I got it to work fine with nginx, but it somehow still felt rather experimental. Perhaps it's just me. I wrote a similar post from a slightly different angle, comparing the cost/benefit of adding different caching layers. This included W3TC and varnish on both apache and nginx, and using a cheap shared hosting. http://blog.gingerlime.com/2012/how-much-cache-is-too-much/ http://blog.gingerlime.com/2012/how-much-cache-is-too-much/