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We Should Ditch Nginx

hipyoungstartup.com

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Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#111

Post by x3ro »

danenania wrote: post #65

Why is this getting upvoted? We should ditch Nginx because they are trying to build a sustainable business on top of their amazing OSS contribution? When quality OSS projects like Nginx turn into profitable businesses, that's very good for OSS as a whole. We should be cheering them and gasp paying them if we need their high end features, not abandoning them.

This. How can people that (assumingly) have never supported the NGINX project whine about it needing money to continue developing high quality open source software?

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#112

Post by ars_technician »

icambron wrote: post #78
Karunamon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can sympathize with this: >Yep, they took a feature that Apache httpd has had literally forever and put it behind a pay wall. Charging for support is one thing, but this seems like it should be a basic feature. And if I were running a server farm on FOSS software and then realized I'd need to cough up ($1350 * ~100) around $135k for the ability to disable obnoxious behavior , because the corporation arbitrarily dec…

It's perfectly reasonable to cringe at a $135K price tag. But if that's so onerous, why not spend a day compiling the source and setting it up for distribution on your servers? The answer is that you (or at least the hypothetical you) feel entitled to this software packaged how you want it with the features you want. If you want to use Apache, use Apache. That's totally your right. Or you can fork NGINX and do whatev…

>To be clear, it's perfectly fine to say, "I don't think this is a good feature to put behind the paywall." I'm just balking at the whiny and entitled tone of the original post. "How dare they ask me to pay for the things I want!" If I were trying to monetize an open source project, per Jacques's comment above, this is exactly the kind of high-scale feature I'd target for that.

And you would be an anchor dragging the project down. You aren't considering the angle of external contributors. As someone who submits patches to open source projects, I would be pretty damn pissed if the project I spent hours/days/weeks learning the architecture of pulled some shit like this. Especially if they rejected a patch because the feature in the patch was too 'useful'. Disgusting.

How long do you think you will keep getting external contributors when they can't even use the full software and are afraid to put the work into patches because they might conflict with the 'enterprise offering'?

If you open source something and allow external contributors, you are going to receive this entitled tone when you pull these shenanigans.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#113

Post by ars_technician »

jacques_chester wrote: post #93
jesalas wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty simple actually: We don't have an HTTP server software budget. The expectation is that the tech team will choose the right tools for the job and ask for paid tools when we need them (eg. New Relic). NGINX doesn't differentiate enough from the other HTTP servers out there to justify the cost.

> NGINX doesn't differentiate enough from the other HTTP servers out there to justify the cost. Then why the angst? This just makes me more confused about what your argument is.

It's a sad reason to have to drop a piece of software and learn the config management of another. logging, really?

Perhaps in the next version it will be free for up to 20 concurrent connections and then $1 for each one after that.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#114

Post by ars_technician »

fit2rule wrote: post #102
jesalas wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why's it over the top for my company to ditch NGINX because it's missing a feature that Apache httpd provides?

Because you depend on a tool that you're not willing to pay for .. is it so difficult to see that you are being viewed as a bit of a scrooge, given that you will profit greatly from software you don't own and haven't paid for .. ?

First, there is no proof of how much profit comes from nginx in a stack with PHP so you can drop the 'profit greatly' line.

Second, the entire point of open source software and the FOSS movement is that you shouldn't be extorted for functionality. Do you harass people that file bug reports or submit requests for features to the Linux Kernel for not paying?

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#115

Post by ars_technician »

x0x0 wrote: post #62
venus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"NGINX Plus Standard" costs $1,350 annual subscription per server. It sounds like this company has a pretty strange setup, running "hundreds of VMs", presumably all running nginx, and it's the combined impact of those VM logging writes that are so burdening the NetApp devices. In this case, if they kept the same setup, I can see that it would be prohibitively expensive to pay for nginx plus on every single one of tho…

first, that price is almost certainly negotiable, particularly if you call and say "i'm running a ton of light vms for some strange reason" second, I think, at least for me, what bugs me is the massive entitlement on display. God forbid devs who built an awesome piece of software get paid; instead, dude whinges on the internet that he might have to gasp patch and compile an rpm or fork out some money. The horrors!

>second, I think, at least for me, what bugs me is the massive entitlement on display. God forbid devs who built an awesome piece of software get paid; instead, dude whinges on the internet that he might have to gasp patch and compile an rpm or fork out some money. The horrors!

On the surface yes, but consider the betrayal to all of the external contributors. Is the money going to them too? What about the people that wasted time proposing a patch that overlapped with this 'enterprise feature'. Open source is not a one-way street.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#116

Post by ars_technician »

jacques_chester wrote: post #57
venus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"NGINX Plus Standard" costs $1,350 annual subscription per server. It sounds like this company has a pretty strange setup, running "hundreds of VMs", presumably all running nginx, and it's the combined impact of those VM logging writes that are so burdening the NetApp devices. In this case, if they kept the same setup, I can see that it would be prohibitively expensive to pay for nginx plus on every single one of tho…

I am not disagreeing that in this specific case that the licence structure might lead to unhappy arithmetic. I do however stand by my original point that syslog support is an excellent cleavage point to segment the customer base.

>I do however stand by my original point that syslog support is an excellent cleavage point to segment the customer base.

Probably because you are not a systems engineer. Did you see what it resulted in here? Many of the people who have systems large enough to hit these issues will just work around it using the ramfs approach or by just dumping nginx. Either way you have a skilled engineer disappointed in your product.

Don't differentiate FOSS with paid on something that simple, especially something that has been supported by apache for almost a decade.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#117

Post by adobriyan »

GhotiFish wrote: post #81
danenania wrote: post #65

Why is this getting upvoted? We should ditch Nginx because they are trying to build a sustainable business on top of their amazing OSS contribution? When quality OSS projects like Nginx turn into profitable businesses, that's very good for OSS as a whole. We should be cheering them and gasp paying them if we need their high end features, not abandoning them.

sensible right up until they start rejecting patches for needed features because they conflict with commercial goals. There's a legitimate conflict of interest here.

How DARE they do what they want with the code they wrote!

this hip young whatever rubbish can not even handle load generated from HN front page, maybe they should not ditch Nginx for now and use it to survive slashdot effect, but then of course ditch this horrible horrible web server...

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#118

Post by delian66 »

TylerE wrote: post #20
ridruejo wrote: post #15

Apache 2.4 with event MPM should give you comparable performance to nginx

Looks more like a factor of 2 difference to me: http://blog.zhuzhaoyuan.com/2012/02/apache-24-faster-than-ng...

The article's actual title is "Apache 2.4 Faster Than Nginx?" . As most articles having a question mark at the end of their title, not surprisingly the answer is "no" ... Quoting from the article itself:

>> It turned out that it’s a false claim. Apache 2.4 is actually much slower than Nginx!

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#119

Post by ars_technician »

grey-area wrote: post #87
sbierwagen wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the NSA, presumably: http://exiledonline.com/read-yasha-levines-introduction-to-t...

Not a customer of Cloudflare, but that seems a bit unlikely given the CEO has called NSA gag orders 'insane': http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/12...

A CEO disagreeing with gag orders has not been a good indicator in the past.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#120

Post by ars_technician »

rdtsc wrote: post #67

Ok, fight fire with fire (inflammatory post with inflammatory response) here it goes: Scumbag Hipster Young Startup -- with a 3 floor building (mentioned CEO coming down all the way from the 3rd floor), aggregating 50M events related to sales every day, taking advantage of hundreds of thousands of volunteered man hours put into the FOSS stack they are using, are throwing a hissy fit about having to pay the creators o…

Is this money going to the external contributors as well? Volunteers that submitted patches, tests, and documentation?
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