Nginx Server

Nginx (pronounced "engine-ex") is an open source reverse proxy server for HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols, as well as a load balancer, HTTP cache, and a web server (origin server). NGINX is the most popular open source web server for high-traffic websites, powering over 140 million overall. NGINX Plus is the fully supported, commercial version of NGINX. It includes the NGINX open source modules and adds enterprise-class features such as application load balancing, health checks, streaming media delivery, activity monitoring and on-the-fly reconfiguration.

The nginx project started with a strong focus on high concurrency, high performance and low memory usage. It is licensed under the 2-clause BSD-like license and it runs on Linux, BSD variants, Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, as well as on other *nix flavors. It also has a proof of concept port for Microsoft Windows.

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. For a long time, it has been running on many heavily loaded Russian sites including Yandex, Mail.Ru, VKontakte, and Rambler. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 17.82% busiest sites in April 2014.

Why Nginx?

NGINX is a high performance, open source web application accelerator that helps over 37% of the world’s busiest websites deliver more content, faster, to its users.
Companies deploy NGINX to manage the complexities and pitfalls associated with HTTP and to make their web applications more responsive, scalable, fast and secure.
NGINX is commonly installed between the network and the application to offload concurrency processing, URL switching, HTTP load balancing, SSL termination, caching, and security policies.

Description of Nginx

Nginx can be deployed to serve dynamic HTTP content on the network using FastCGI, SCGI handlers for scripts, WSGI application servers or Phusion Passenger module, and it can serve as a software load balancer. Its development started in 2002 by Igor Sysoev. In July 2011, a company was formed as Nginx, Inc. Its principal place of business is San Francisco, California. The company offered commercial support in February 2012, and paid NGINX Plus subscription in August 2013. An investment of $10 million led by New Enterprise Associates was reported in October 2013. Other investors reportedly included Aaron Levie. WordPress developer Automattic and Content Delivery Network provider MaxCDN have become funding partners for an update to Google's SPDY version 3.1, slated for early 2014.

Nginx uses an asynchronous event-driven approach to handling requests, instead of the Apache HTTP Server model that defaults to a threaded or process-oriented approach, where the Event MPM is required for asynchronous processing. Nginx's modular event-driven architecture can provide more predictable performance under high loads.

Originally, nginx was developed to fill the needs of websites including Rambler, for which it was serving 500 million requests per day by September 2008. According to Netcraft's February 2014 Web Server Survey, nginx was found to be the third most widely used web server across all domains (15% of surveyed sites) and the second most widely used web server for all "active" sites (13.46% of surveyed sites). According to W3Techs, it was used by 21.5% of the top 1 million websites, 29% of the top 100,000 websites, and by 38.5% of the top 1,000 websites. According to BuiltWith, it is used on 20.8% of the top 10,000 websites, and its growth within the top 10k, 100k and 1 million segments increased. Wikipedia uses nginx as its SSL termination proxy. As of OpenBSD release 5.2 (1 November 2012), nginx became part of the OpenBSD base system, providing an alternative to the system's fork of Apache 1.3, which it was intended to replace. Eventually, Apache was removed from the base system.

HTTP proxy and Web server features of Nginx

•    Ability to handle more than 10,000 simultaneous connections with a low memory footprint (~2.5 MB per 10k inactive HTTP keep-alive connections)

•    Handling of static files, index files, and auto-indexing

•    Reverse proxy with caching

•    Load balancing with in-band health checks

•    Fault tolerance

•    TLS/SSL with SNI and OCSP stapling support, via OpenSSL.

•    FastCGI, SCGI, uWSGI support with caching

•    Name- and IP address-based virtual servers

•    IPv6-compatible

•    SPDY protocol support

•    WebSockets and HTTP/1.1 Upgrade (101 Switching Protocols)

•    FLV and MP4[28] streaming

•    Web page access authentication

•    gzip compression and decompression

•    URL rewriting

•    Custom logging with on-the-fly gzip compression

•    Response rate and concurrent requests limiting

•    Bandwidth throttling

•    Server Side Includes

•    IP address-based geolocation

•    User tracking

•    WebDAV

•    XSLT data processing

•    Embedded Perl scripting