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Poll: What web server do you use?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: What web server do you use?

#31

Post by steveklabnik »

pavs wrote: post #13

I am currently using Apache and its the only web server I ever used, I have looked in to Lighttpd and Nginx but never actually used it. Can anyone tell me why I should use the other two over Apache? The main reason I am using Apache because it has a large user base, community and documentation that I can rely on if I ever need any help.

To add to the responses below, my sites are done with Rails, which tends to want to do things inside of Rails itself, rather than use features of the web server. All I want out of a server is to manage incoming requests and route them to Unicorn. So the large featureset of Apache is a downside, and the leanness of nginx is an upside.

Re: Poll: What web server do you use?

#35

Post by anonymouslambda »

dagw wrote: post #27
sirn wrote: post #25

I was using Nginx for static files and a reverse proxy (+balancer) to CherryPy until recently. Now switched to Nginx + uWSGI for everything and couldn't be happier. Nginx is very fast, even when on-the-fly Gzip is enabled.

I'm currently running Nginx+CherryPy and I'm if you'd like to comment on why you switched to uWSGI, what you gained and if you'd recommend it?

I haven't used CherryPy, but run Cherokee+uWSGI for Django and uWSGI is fast, handles load well, and has a very small memory footprint.

Re: Poll: What web server do you use?

#38

Post by mastorrent »

For my Ajax apps I run nginx and Apache simultaneously. I don't like giving up Apache's module-based performance advantages for the application layer, but its memory usage is too high for my VPS if I want to use KeepAlive. I use nginx as the front-line web server and configure it to serve pre-gzipped static content and maintain KeepAlive connections. It then proxies dynamic requests to the Apache server. All makes for a nice low memory footprint :)

Re: Poll: What web server do you use?

#39

Post by michaelbuckbee »

What has really jumped out to me in the comments is just how complex the web stack configuration has gotten to be.

It's almost not enough to just say "Nginx", you have to specify if you're using it in front of Mongrel/Passenger/Unicorn, just to serve static content, load balancing, etc.

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