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Why Use Nginx?

wiki.nginx.org

1–10 of 91 posts

Re: Why Use Nginx?

#3
One major drawback is you can't control output buffering and gzip with phpfpm (LAMP stack equivalent) You cannot flush head, the user has to wait until the whole page loads before rendering.

Re: Why Use Nginx?

#4

One major drawback is you can't control output buffering and gzip with phpfpm (LAMP stack equivalent) You cannot flush head, the user has to wait until the whole page loads before rendering.

Latest version got much better at handling streams if I remember correctly

Re: Why Use Nginx?

#6
Every single project, open source or not, needs to have a "Why Use It" page.

(Now this is more of a "Testimonials" page, but for server tech it will do.)

> Apache is like Microsoft Word, it has a million options but you only need six. Nginx does those six things, and it does five of them 50 times faster than Apache.

This is exactly how I felt. I'm a pea-brained dolt in the server sphere, and when I was remaking my server I went with nginx over apache on the advice of a friend because "the config file is easier to understand."

He was right. And instead of being frustrated and bumbling through apache until it worked the way I wanted, I was able to configure nginx (for the first time!) in mere minutes. With nginx I was able to move on to the "get frustrated by Wordpress" phase of server setup much sooner!

Re: Why Use Nginx?

#7
Nginx is the most reliable workhorse I've used in nearly any tech stack. Doesn't matter how much traffic we throw at it, it just keeps on kicking. It's very much the 'Redis' of proxy servers.

Re: Why Use Nginx?

#8
A big gotcha with nginx is if you have an app server behind it and you foolishly have a long running web request which runs longer than the proxy timeout, nginx will retry the original web request. Better make sure everything is idempotent and don't have long running web processes. It is bad design, but we ran into this. Code that used to run in a few seconds started taking longer and then ran infinitely long without an error because it kept getting resent to the server.

Re: Why Use Nginx?

#9

Every single project, open source or not, needs to have a "Why Use It" page. (Now this is more of a "Testimonials" page, but for server tech it will do.) > Apache is like Microsoft Word, it has a million options but you only need six. Nginx does those six things, and it does five of them 50 times faster than Apache. This is exactly how I felt. I'm a pea-brained dolt in the server sphere, and when I was remaking my se…

> Every single project, open source or not, needs to have a "Why Use It" page.

Not only that, but a mention of all the major competitors with an honest factual comparison with them is really handy as well. In the FLOSS world, naming competitors won't necessarily cause a major problem and does a huge amount for trust.

Re: Why Use Nginx?

#10
post #7

Nginx is the most reliable workhorse I've used in nearly any tech stack. Doesn't matter how much traffic we throw at it, it just keeps on kicking. It's very much the 'Redis' of proxy servers.

Given that nginx is almost twice as old as redis, shouldn't that analogy rather be "redis is the nginx of databases"? ;)
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