Nginx is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, as well as an IMAP/POP3 proxy server. Igor Sysoev started development of Nginx in 2002, with the first public release in 2004. Nginx now hosts nearly 12.18% (22.2M) of active sites across all domains. Nginx is known for its high performance, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.

Nginx is one of a handful of servers written to address the C10K problem. Unlike traditional servers, Nginx doesn't rely on threads to handle requests. Instead it uses a much more scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture. This architecture uses small, but more importantly, predictable amounts of memory under load.
Even if you don't expect to handle thousands of simultaneous requests, you can still benefit from Nginx's high-performance and small memory footprint. Nginx scales in all directions: from the smallest VPS all the way up to clusters of servers.

Nginx powers several high-visibility sites, such as Netflix, Hulu, Pinterest, CloudFlare, Airbnb, WordPress.com, GitHub, SoundCloud, Zynga, Eventbrite, Zappos, Media Temple, Heroku, RightScale, Engine Yard and NetDNA

Nginx 1.2.0 Released

The first version of the 1.2.x stable branch has been released.

1.2.0 incorporates many new features developed in the 1.1.x branch, including the following:

• support for keepalive connections to upstream servers (HTTP 1.1)
• consolidation of multiple simultaneous requests to upstream servers if caching is used
• support for multiple request and connection limits used simultaneously
• reduced memory consumption in various edge cases like handling of long-lived requests

Read the full changelog.

Nginx lands $3M in funding, plans to open San Francisco headquarters

Open source web server developer NGINX has received $3 million in a fully subscribed Series A round. Today NGINX powers over 40,000,000 domains on the Internet, and over 20% of the top 1000 busiest websites around the world, including Facebook, Zappos, Groupon, LivingSocial, Hulu, TechCrunch, Dropbox and WordPress.

"Several of the companies we invested in were able to solve significant scaling issues by switching their web platforms to NGINX," said Thomas Gieselmann of BV Capital. "NGINX transparently and effectively enables the growth of the largest sites on the Internet today."

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Nginx book is available!

Clement Nedelcu has written the first English book covering Nginx including such topics as downloading and installing Nginx, configuring and using modules, and much more. It provides step-by-step tutorials for replacing your existing web server with Nginx. With commented configuration sections and in-depth module descriptions, you will be able to make the most of the performance potential offered by Nginx.