Installing Varnish, Nginx, Apache, APC, & Wordpress On A Single Server, Good or Bad?

Um, that is a huge box for a wordpress site. Even for a really big wordpress site. So short answer, yes. It is enough. Skip Varnish. Use Nginx for static assets. Use Nginx caching (http://wiki.nginx.org/ReverseProxyCachingExample) nginx caching uses a similar technique to varnish. You probably won't notice the performance difference. You will notice the difference with figuring out the best cache times, best cache expiry, etc. Try setting your cache times to 1 second. It will mean your server will only need to handle 1 req/sec as most HTTP GET will be from the cache. Nginx is really smart, when the cache is invalidated it can serve the stale data while the cache is being updated from Wordpress/PHP. Skip Apache. Use PHP-FPM, have nginx talk to it via a unix socket. You save yourself the RAM of apache. You save yourself the TCP/IP over head (yes ther still is some when talking to localhost) of proxying to localhost. (http://wiki.nginx.org/PHPFcgiExample#Using_a_Unix_Socket) Database, do you have more than 2GBs of blog posts? If not, it doesn't really matter if it is on the same box. Assuming Wordpress + MySQL, you can even have PHP connect to a mysql's unix socket. Again saving the TCP overhead. Done. Go serve 2000+/req/sec now. :) Edit Oh i missed the cpanel require. But a quick google revealed: http://www.prohost.be/blog/centos/installing-php-fpm-for-cpanel/

To add on top of what mentioned above (very good advice and highly recommended), I don't think you even need apache since you have nginx in the game. Apache consumes a lot of ram and resources in general where nginx treats them with "respect". So using nginx as your main server is recommended since with the same resources it can do more for you. If you want to read more about nginx, a good explanation is given by at . By using the setup Varnish-> Nginx (apc, php-fpm) and memcached (since it's a distributed cache and same cache can be used by many servers e.g. db server and varnish) you should be more than fine.

Now sure how much traffic you are planning for. But if you could increase RAM to 8GB, which is pretty cheap now-a-days. And I dont see any point of using so many things. Varnish is not necessary, if its only for WordPress, NGiNX could handle it alone, and I think memcached over FastCGI with PHP+FPM works better. Even if you could configure from server end W3TC is really not necessary. But for most guys W3TC is just easy.

How about trying G-WAN? It performs much better than nginx or any other existing webserver. Possibly use HipHop to translate Php to C++. You will instantly see the difference. One of the stronger points G-WAN being the  Key-Value Store which inserts 100 million keys per second Though nginx integration isnt supported directly on cpanel, you can resort to a plugin, http://nginxcp.%C3%82%C2%A0%20Do keep in mind, nginx doesn't support .htaccess at account level, htaccess based caching rules for the w3 TC plugin may have to be defined independently.