We Should Ditch Nginx

> Who will pick up the mantle and actively develop the next game-changing FOSS web server?

We are writing and waiting. I don't mean to be harsh - but if you were to suggest people to ditch nginx, take the initiative and fork it and start doing the support. It's one of those "rants" we hear and nobody does anything.

> Getting these NGINX log events into a remote server is easy with rsyslog. But preventing the log events from writing to disk in the first place?

And what is the problem with writing to disk? I guess RAM disk is fine? I am not really sure what's the issue with writing to disk. Most of the time it's the application and securing disk more important.

I still don't see any convincing argument why we should ditch Nginx. To me all the points so far is about Nginx going commercial.

This position is without merit. People have every right to say that one particular free option is not what they're looking for, and explain why it's not what they're looking for.

>I don't mean to be harsh - but if you were to suggest people to ditch nginx, take the initiative and fork it and start doing the support.

Perhaps he doesn't have the hours/skills free to do so. People are free to complain about things or do a 'call-to-arms' about things they can't fix themselves.

>And what is the problem with writing to disk?

Performance

>I guess RAM disk is fine?

It works, but it's a hack and major technical debt to hold.

> I am not really sure what's the issue with writing to disk.

Performance. Specifically the thundering herd problem. All of his servers log to virtual disks all stored on the same SAN, which is stressing under the load.

>I still don't see any convincing argument why we should ditch Nginx.

It's a bit of a slippery slope fallacy, but the point is that a basic feature is being held hostage behind a pay-wall. It would be like MySQL requiring you to pay to any users other than the 'admin' SQL account.

Sigh. FOSS and NGINX as an example of FOSS have given us so much. If direct to syslog logging is what you're after, why not use Apache? As many people have pointed out before, Apache can certainly be hold a candle to NGINX if you put the time into tuning it. If you're expecting Black Friday traffic of this magnitude, and you haven't spent the last two months planning and load testing for it, you are either lazy or underpaid. If the first, okay, I get why you don't want to roll your own RPM. If the second, that's just what this business can expect out of their setup.

No one is going to dump NGINX over this. If it is this mission critical to your business, pony up and pay for NGINX.

> We’re using php-fpm anyway; the performance difference between nginx and httpd in this scenario is negligible.

So why are we even having this discussion? Honestly if you're experiencing that much traffic and PHP performance is hindering you, you should consider some sort of Varnish full-page caching anyhow. Disk writes, as you note, are not your primary issue, and certainly is no reason to dump NGINX.

You can compile nginx with syslog support with this module https://github.com/yaoweibin/nginx_syslog_patch and avoid writing to disk.

syslog is still blocking though.