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Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

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Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#211
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Wikipedia -- in broad strokes -- just sucks, check what happened to the Scottish Wikipedia (but there are any number of issues in the English one as well, the "no credentials" policy made sure scientists shun it because they don't want to endlessly argue with neckbeards with an agenda). Anyways, https://tadviser.com/index.php/Company:Nginx everything is dropped in Russia, there's a lawsuit in the US but at first…

That's why we rely on people like you to update article at wikipedia, your services are invaluable!

When I do this, with sources, I find some power user has reverted the change within minutes or hours without so much as a meaningful comment.

Not sure when it happened, but Wikipedia has long been a collection of fiefdoms, jealously guarded by power users and their sycophants.

Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#212
With Almaty, Kazakhstan in the news recently because of protests [1] , I thought this part was interesting

> Igor came from humble beginnings. The son of a military officer, he was born in a small town in Kazakhstan (then a Soviet republic). His family moved to the capital Almaty when he was a year old.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59927267

Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#213
post #186

Can someone summarize what allowed nginx to surmount the C10K problem? Was it some clever trick or just good software design?

If memory serves me, nginx succeeded by relying on epoll primitives for handling many connections rather than spinning up a thread per request by default like apache did at the time. That was the big difference back then. These days I imagine Apache has adopted/honed these same techniques.

Yep, epoll was a big part of it making it work around async io rather than threaded.

If someone is interested in reading more, "Flash: An Efficient and Portable Web Server" is a good read on the topic: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix99/full_papers/pa.... It has no relation to Adobe Flash.

epoll has the advantage of operating in O(1) time rather than O(n) time as well which becomes important when you have a lot of file descriptors.

I'd also note that epoll landed with Linux 2.6 so it wasn't really available before 2004. Apache Server was created in 1995 long before epoll and Nginx was initially released in 2004. It's one of those situations where you introduce new capabilities like epoll being able to handle lots of FDs in O(1) time and someone finds a way to use that capability to make something great.

Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#214
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in general, it's probably best to avoid this kind of etymological explanation of the 'actual meaning' of some word or expression because they tend to obscure the usage and, well, actual actual meaning. Saying 'goodbye' in English doesn't really mean saying 'God be with you' to someone, even though that's what it's originally a contraction of. They're fine as etymology, of course!

>Saying 'goodbye' in English doesn't really mean saying 'God be with you' to someone except, of course, when it does. I regularly re-pronounce holiday as holy-day internally, and the same with welcome and well-come; i am, of course, a weirdo.

When I say/hear "do svidanya", I usually don't consciously interpret it as "till next meeting" each time, it's a set phrase and it's usually perceived as a whole, "goodbye". Only you if you put some effort to pay attention to the actual roots that you realize, oh that actually means "till next meeting" (especially since in modern Russian, "svidanye", when used alone, now means "romantic date"). Same with "hello" which literally means "be healthy", it registers as just "hello" in my brain, I don't immediately think "they're wishing me good health". But maybe it's just me.

Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#215

In January 2021, Nginx took over Apache as the #1 web server on the Internet that users can install: https://i.imgur.com/pjU1G61.png https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=http+port%3A443#facet/... I'm a bit surprised it didn't happen earlier as it feels like it's been the dominant choice for tech people.

Wordpress had some say in this i think.

Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#216

I know this is massively off-topic (have a good well paid "retirement" Igor), but I assumed that it would be written as Dos Vidaniya instead of (the correct) Do svidanyia My Russian studies is limited to listening to Sean Connery in The Russia House, and I guess I took Dos from the latin languages. Odd.

Dos Svidanya would be a great cocktail name.

Or early PC software.

Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#217
post #7

I really take for granted how well Nginx works across a number of web backend functions. Some of the container/orchestration world has tried to supplant the need for it as a reverse proxy, but you get so many goodies out of the box just by sticking this in front of your app, and for very little overhead. I remember the pre-Nginx days and all of the struggles people routinely ran into with options like Apache or other…

I mean there was lighttpd before nginx and they have/had pretty similar structures, weights, etc. I feel like I knew at one point why it got so thoroughly supplanted by nginx but I don't remember now why that happened.

Years ago, I was working at a small startup here in Austin (named “Ihiji”), and it was my job to completely rebuild their cloud systems infrastructure. They wanted to use lighttpd instead of Apache. It took a while, but with a bit of a kickstart from a friend who worked at Opscode Chef (thanks, Matt Ray!), I was able to get that done.

With Apache, at their current max load, the systems would just completely fall over, but with lighttpd, at that same load, the system breathed a little hard. I could push lighttpd 10x more before it fell over.

Then we started looking at replacing the haproxy solution, and I looked at nginx. I tried it out. I also tried out replacing lighttpd with nginx. And no matter how hard I pushed nginx, I couldn’t get the damn thing to breathe hard. I couldn’t even push the load average up over 1.0.

We went back to lighttpd and haproxy because those tools gave us better monitoring and logging, but we always held nginx in our back pocket in reserve, in case we needed another 10x beyond what lighttpd+haproxy could do.

And yes, I did get invited to Edinburgh to do a nice little talk on the subject.

They had their ups and downs over the years, but ihiji did end up getting acquired by Control4, and the founders are now off doing other weird and cool things.

Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#218

“Igor has chosen to step back from NGINX and F5 in order to spend more time with his friends and family” I wonder what this is really about. Either way Nginx is the reason myself and many others were able to survive without raising venture capital because we didn’t need a massive horizontal cluster of Apache servers consuming 20 to 100Mb per concurrent connection. Personally I scaled above 100k current connections on…

I think he was detained recently by the police because there is a claim that he started Nginx while employed at another company. Seems like some sort of shakedown by politically connected people.

Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean there was lighttpd before nginx and they have/had pretty similar structures, weights, etc. I feel like I knew at one point why it got so thoroughly supplanted by nginx but I don't remember now why that happened.

The difference is that nginx really works. I had Panoramio, a photo website featured in Google Earth / Maps, using Apache. It started to fail down under load, and I quickly switched to lighttpd. It was faster but crashing, getting OOM, etc. I fixed a memory leak and a few more bugs, but it still crashed every now and then and I looked for alternatives. This was 2006 and nginx was the only realistic alternative on the…

Wait you made Flaticon? I would like to to say thank you. Before I truly got into software I was a humble associate consultant and I honestly don't know how I would have made all those decks without you.

Re: Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i speak russian fluently and still parsed the title as "Do" +

I'm not fluent, but I've been studying for 3 years now. I hate when people use latin characters to 'sound out' russian words. When I see Cyrillic, my brain immediately switches to Russian. When it's latin sounding out Russian, it takes a stupid amount of time for me to realize and comprehend what they are trying to say.

Accurate transliteration should be fine though. There are also Slavic languages, such as Polish or Czech, that use the Latin alphabet.

One of the annoying things about Latin transliteration is that people use different phonetics of western languages. Should you use y or j for palatal sounds? Seems like there are also french influenced transliterations for vowels. These can be inconsistent based on the source.

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