Justin Carmony has a new tutorial posted to his blog today about setting up Nginx and PHP-FPM on Ubuntu in a few easy steps (thanks to some package management).

This is another wonderful setup that I've found myself using rather than the traditional Apache & mod_php setup. [...] Ngnix, unlike Apache, doesn't actually load PHP. Instead, it hands it off as a proxy to a "php handler" which acts like an Application Server. So nginx by itself won't serve PHP files, but just static files.

He briefly introduces Nginx and PHP-FPM for those not familiar and points out that this combination is very fast, even without much configuration. The packages are installed with the aptitude installer and minimal changes are made to the php-fm and nginx configuration files (mostly to set up whatever your domain/virtual host is).