How do you compare Nginx and Cherokee in terms of memory usage and performance? My VPS serves Drupal 6.16, magento 1.4.1 and CS-CART 2.0.15 with apache2 prefork-mpm. Apache2 eats my memory even though my sites are pretty low traffic profile (htop shows that each apache process eats %18 memory) . If I change apache to nginx or cherokee will I face any compatibility issues with magento, cs-cart and drupal? Which one is the most compatible with? I reallly appreciate any production system experience.Thanks.
You can greatly reduce the memory consumption of your VPS by installing a PHP accelerator such a eAccelerator. In most cases Apache web server will perform just fine. You might need to tweak it to optimize for your specific set up. You need to do some reading up on that though, since there is no silver bullet when it comes to that.