Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email
Answers.com

Nginx

 
Wikipedia: Nginx
nginx
Nginx.gif
Developer(s) Igor Sysoev
Stable release 0.7.64 / 2009-11-16; 12 days ago
Preview release 0.8.27 / 2009-11-17; 11 days ago
Operating system Unix-like, Windows
Type Web server, E-mail proxy
License BSD-like
Website www.nginx.net

nginx (pronounced as "engine X") is a lightweight, high performance web server/reverse proxy and e-mail (IMAP/POP3) proxy, licensed under a BSD-like license. It runs on UNIX, GNU/Linux, BSD variants, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows[1].

Contents

Users

Originally, nginx was developed to fill the needs of various websites run by Rambler, for which it was serving 500 million requests per day as of September 2008.[2] According to the November 2009 Netcraft survey, nginx is now used on 14,988,610 domains, making it the fourth most popular web server, and the third most popular non in-house.[3]

Basic HTTP features

  • Handling of static files, index files and auto-indexing
  • Reverse proxy with caching
  • Load balancing
  • fault tolerance
  • SSL support
  • FastCGI support, with caching, although it doesn't have CGI support.
  • Name- and IP-based virtual servers
  • FLV streaming
  • MP4 streaming, using the MP4 streaming module
  • Web page access authentication
  • gzip compression

Mail proxy features

Performance

As reverse proxy

I currently have nginx doing reverse proxy of over tens of millions of HTTP requests per day (thats a few hundred per second) on a *single server*. At peak load it uses about 15MB RAM and 10% CPU on my particular configuration (FreeBSD 6).

Under the same kind of load, apache falls over (after using 1000 or so processes and god knows how much RAM), pound falls over (too many threads, and using 400MB+ of RAM for all the thread stacks), and lighty *leaks* more than 20MB per hour (and uses more CPU, but not significantly more).

Load balancer

Wordpress.com has found nginx to be the only software load balancer able to handle 8000 live traffic requests per second.[4]

See also

External links

Articles

References


Search unanswered questions...
Enter a question here...
Search: All sources Community Q&A Reference topics
 
 
Learn More
Httpd
Simple Common Gateway Interface
HTTP compression

Post a question - any question - to the WikiAnswers community:

 

Copyrights:

Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Nginx" Read more