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NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative

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Re: NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative

#11

Post by suneilp »

kalak451 wrote: post #8
casca wrote: post #4

This is a very strange post. nginx is highly mainstream and anyone working with webservers in any capacity should have come across it a number of years ago.

You would think so, but I still see new projects started every day using Apache for something nginx would be a much better fit for. I think that mostly the admins and architects on these projects have simply never heard of nginx, or if they have, they don't really know what it does.

It seems like you're making the assumption that 'they' would choose nginx just because it's superior.

There are many reasons for them not to go with nginx. The biggest one is probably that it's just different. Managing it is different. Configuring it is different (regardless of any similarities). Testing is still required.

It's nothing new that a lot of people either want to be lazy or are afraid of taking risks.

Being 'better' alone isn't a good enough reason to expect everyone to switch.

Re: NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative

#12

Post by corin_ »

kalak451 wrote: post #8
casca wrote: post #4

This is a very strange post. nginx is highly mainstream and anyone working with webservers in any capacity should have come across it a number of years ago.

You would think so, but I still see new projects started every day using Apache for something nginx would be a much better fit for. I think that mostly the admins and architects on these projects have simply never heard of nginx, or if they have, they don't really know what it does.

Don't underestimate how much people prefer to work with what they know. There's been plenty of times when I've gone with Apache on a server just because nginx's benefits aren't going to make a huge difference and I've been using Apache long enough to be able to configure it in my sleep.

Re: NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative

#13

Post by jrabone »

Ummm... Inconsistent, much?

"NGINX (pronounced “engine X”) is an open-source HTTP Web server that also includes mail services with an Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Post Office Protocol (POP) server. NGINX is ready to be used as a reverse proxy, too."

vs.

"While the other web servers differentiate by having lots of features and being something like a general purpose web software, NGINX excels in the set of key features associated with performance, scalability, and cost efficiency."

Which is it? I just want something that accepts HTTP(S) connections. In JavaLand, Jetty works pretty well using the non-blocking (select style) connector, and it's trivially embeddable.

Re: NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative

#14

Post by TylerE »

jrabone wrote: post #13

Ummm... Inconsistent, much? "NGINX (pronounced “engine X”) is an open-source HTTP Web server that also includes mail services with an Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Post Office Protocol (POP) server. NGINX is ready to be used as a reverse proxy, too." vs. "While the other web servers differentiate by having lots of features and being something like a general purpose web software, NGINX excels in the set…

It actually is sort of both. The core feature set is well designed and relatively slim, and supports the three most common topologies - as a front end for static content, as a front-end up for an external "web engine", e.g. php-fpm or rack or a WSGI app, or as a reverse proxy/load balancer.

It's a very good 90% solution - 90% of the time it does everything you need, and it does it well. That comes at the cost of supporting certain corner cases or features, WebDAV for instance.

Where it might not be as good as in something like a shared hosting environment where you want to give users something they can tweak like an .htaccess file. That sort of per-request configuration loading runs counter to the performance profile they're trying to provide.

Re: NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative

#17

Post by stanleydrew »

leeoniya wrote: post #6

been using a portable LEMP setup for several months. my progression has been XAMPP > Uniform Server > LEMP w/start stop batch scripts. i just tweaked https://github.com/Xeoncross/wnmp a bit for my uses. buttery smooth goodness. my only complaint about nginx is the way it tries to make location ordering "magical". there's often no clear way of forcing a specific location assertion order because of regex vs literal, te…

Yeah I agree about the location directive's magicalness being impossible to keep in my head for more than a couple minutes. I spend a fair bit of time configuring nginx and I constantly refer to this page:

http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpCoreModule#location

I still love it compared to Apache though in terms of ease of configuration.

Re: NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative

#18

Post by fennecfoxen »

suneilp wrote: post #11
kalak451 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think so, but I still see new projects started every day using Apache for something nginx would be a much better fit for. I think that mostly the admins and architects on these projects have simply never heard of nginx, or if they have, they don't really know what it does.

It seems like you're making the assumption that 'they' would choose nginx just because it's superior. There are many reasons for them not to go with nginx. The biggest one is probably that it's just different. Managing it is different. Configuring it is different (regardless of any similarities). Testing is still required. It's nothing new that a lot of people either want to be lazy or are afraid of taking risks. Bei…

Different is risky. Consider, for example, lighttpd, another lightweight Apache alternative. It was chosen for a certain project at a former workplace of mine. Not too very long afterward, significant problems with memory leaks started occurring on the deployments that used it, and I found myself tasked with fixing them.

I was unprepared and somewhat astounded to find that lighttpd does not support sending "large files" over CGI, FastCGI, or proxy connections, and the maintainers don't care (cf. http://redmine.lighttpd.net/issues/1283 ...)

Besides the waste of engineering time, customers were impacted.

Re: NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative

#19

Post by rorrr »

leeoniya wrote: post #6

been using a portable LEMP setup for several months. my progression has been XAMPP > Uniform Server > LEMP w/start stop batch scripts. i just tweaked https://github.com/Xeoncross/wnmp a bit for my uses. buttery smooth goodness. my only complaint about nginx is the way it tries to make location ordering "magical". there's often no clear way of forcing a specific location assertion order because of regex vs literal, te…

"and your ready to roll"

seriously?

Re: NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative

#20

Post by mike-cardwell »

zavulon wrote: post #16

> One of the leading alternatives, the open-source NGINX, is now the number two Web server in the world, according to Netcraft, the Web server analytics company. Netcraft confirms: Apache is dying.

Incorrect. Nginx overtaking IIS was first seen here:

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2012/01/03/january-2012-we...

Look at the graphs on that page. You'll see that Apache is still number 1 (as it has been for the past 16 years), still has by far the largest market share, and is still growing fast. Faster than Nginx if you look at total numbers.

Nginx's primary benefit is performance, gained from its event based request model. Guess what Apache 2.4 has... The same thing. The idea that Apache is dying is laughable.

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