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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 11.28% (43M) of all domains worldwide. Netcraft predicts that current trends will soon have Nginx surpassing Microsoft IIS as the second most popular web server.
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 WordPress, Hulu, Github, Ohloh, SourceForge, WhitePages and TorrentReactor.
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."
Nginx 1.0 is released!
Here we go!
nginx-1.0.0 stable version has been released.
The repository is available at svn://svn.nginx.org.
Nginx development started about 9 years ago. The first public version 0.1.0 was released on October 4, 2004. Now W3Techs reports that 6.8% of the top 1 million sites on the web (according to Alexa) and 46.9% of top Russian sites use nginx.
Netcraft reports similar 6.52% nginx share of the million busiest sites in April 2011.
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.
I ran a simple test against Nginx v0.5.22 and Apache v2.2.8 using ab (Apache's benchmarking tool). During the tests, I monitored the system with vmstat and top. The results indicate that Nginx outperforms Apache when serving static content. Both servers performed best with a concurrency of 100. Apache used four worker processes (threaded mode), 30% CPU and 17MB of memory to serve 6,500 requests per second. Nginx used one worker, 15% CPU and 1MB of memory to serve 11,500 requests per second.
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