I have read this article about 400% boost of your website. This is done by a combination of nginx and memcached. The how-to part of this website is quite good, but i mis the part where it says to what types of websites this applies.
I know nginx is a http engine, I need no explanation for that.
I thought memcached had something to do with caching database result. However i don’t understand what this has to do with the http request, can someone please explain that to me.
Another question I have is for what types of websites is this used. I have a website where the important part of the website consist of data that changes often. Often being minutes.
Will this method still apply to me, or should I just stick with the basic boring setup of apache and nothing else.
memcached is a generic memory data cache. It’s probably most commonly used to cache database objects, but it can accomplish a large number of other tasks.
The particular article you linked is describing how to use nginx in place of the Mongrel httpd usually used for the Rails web framework. memcached is being used to cache the results of dynamic pages that use querystrings to generate the dynamic content; in this specific use case, it appears the page will generate identical results with an identical querystring each time, so significant performance gains can be had by simply bypassing appserver generation and caching the rendered HTML in memcached.
Despite the somewhat overhyped headline, the article is not giving a use case that is appropriate for all (or even most) dynamic web pages. But if you have pages which require a lot of computation and return the same results with the same parameters for all users (public search results are a good example), this solution will give you significant performance improvement.