I’ve moved from using Apache as a web server to nginx for various projects. The machines I’m running these projects on are a somewhat resource constrained and nginx deals with low resource machines much better than Apache does and tends to serve content faster in those circumstances. For example switching the machine that hosts this WordPress blog from Apache and mod_php to nginx with php-fpm improved the pingdom load times on this blog by about 30% with no other changes.

The last piece of the puzzle was to get newsyslog to rotate the nginx logs. The instructions on BSD Start suggest they’re for FreeBSD 10, but they work fine on FreeBSD 9.x as well.