8 ms·

Why Use Nginx?

210 points by seclabor 14y ago

Refefer 14y ago
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.
- thiderman 14y ago
  Given that nginx is almost twice as old as redis, shouldn't that analogy rather be "redis is the nginx of databases"? ;)
foohey 14y ago
Fake, these guys are corrupted and benchmarks are rigged :-P </joke> Long live to Nginx !
velodrome 14y ago
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.
- mk3 14y ago
  Latest version got much better at handling streams if I remember correctly
  - velodrome 14y ago
    True. Correct me if I am wrong but I am not sure if streams work for general text pages (like blogs, eCommerce, etc). It is better suited for chat-style applications (comet).
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
simonsarris 14y ago
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!
- rlpb 14y ago
  > 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.
  - StuieK 14y ago
    Still building the "feature comparison" feature but we have the "why use it" pretty much sorted, example: http://slant.co/topics/what-is-the-best-search-engine-for-web-applications/opinions/elasticsearch http://slant.co/topics/what-is-the-best-search-engine-for-we...
  - byamit 14y ago
    yeah but you can't ask Product X to tell you about Product Y because they honestly don't know Product Y well enough to speak to it.
    - stedaniels 14y ago
      You have to ask yourself, if your building a product and you know nothing about it's potential competitors, what are you really doing? Research is key my opinion. It avoids cases of "Hey guys, look what I invented! I call it the wheel.."
amalag 14y ago
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.
- chubot 14y ago
  Oh really, does it do it for POSTs? It should retry for GET, but not POSTs (which is exactly why there is a difference). If you have non-idempotent GETs in your app, then that's the app's fault. If Nginx is retrying POSTs then it's Nginx's fault.
  - CrLf 14y ago
    That's a pretty broad statement to make... You are assuming that out there only "your app" exists. Actually, many times "your app" is somebody else's app that you bought or an app that somebody else develops and you don't have any control over it. Sometimes those apps are just bad (well, most enterprise apps are) and your only hope is that the infrastructure that you do happen to control doesn't make it worse. I've never used nginx, so I don't know if the parent has a point or not. However, having a reverse proxy retrying _any_ requests to backends by default seems very bad form to me. Do you want your routers resending packets? It's the same thing.
    - scott_w 14y ago
      If you have an app that completely ignores the HTTP specification like that then you could well have bigger problems. I recall reading about a very popular image website doing exactly that and, when Google attempted to index it, some strange things happened to the images as the web crawler chased down all those "safe" links.
    - unclebucknasty 14y ago
      I agree with that. Automatically resenting requests is not good. Better to simply timeout. And if there are enough timeouts that it's causing a problem, the functionality should be restructured.
jstalin 14y ago
I dropped Apache in favor of Nginx about two years ago. Haven't looked back since then. It's so much easier to configure and it uses far less memory.
- dTch7 14y ago
  >it uses far less memory One of the main selling points for me. Especially for personal projects, I can go with a more affordable vps plan by using nginx instead of apache.
- killerpopiller 14y ago
  I am using lighty for that reasons. Can anyone compare lighttpd with nginx performance on small servers like Pis?
  - FooBarWidget 14y ago
    I dropped Lighttpd years ago because on some occasions it used 100% CPU for no reason. It didn't make the server crash, and Lighttpd itself appeared to run fine otherwise, but still... the CPU usage was there for no reason. This was never solved, and development also seemed stalled. So I switched away from Lighttpd to Nginx. Nginx just kept working and working, never broke once.
windsurfer 14y ago
Nginx is great, but before you get down and start using it, make certain that you'll never, ever use any features it doesn't support. I was bitten by this when I found out Nginx has no equivalent to Apache's mpm_itk_module.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  What does that mod do out of curiosity?
  - uggedal 14y ago
    "mpm-itk allows you to run each of your vhost under a separate uid and gid—in short, the scripts and configuration files for one vhost no longer have to be readable for all the other vhosts" - http://mpm-itk.sesse.net/ http://mpm-itk.sesse.net/
    - derefr 14y ago
      I don't quite understand why that would be necessary. Nginx has no business accessing other users' files in the first place. I mean, I understand why Apache needs to do it: with Apache, you have things like mod_php running in-process, so it makes sense to restrict Apache, running one of Bob's scripts, from accessing Alice's files. But with Nginx, anything with "intelligence" runs out-of-process. What Nginx expects you to do is to run it as one user, but run each app server (in PHP terms, each FCGI socket daemon) as the user whose files that server should access. (Or, better yet, run the app server in an LXC container along with a bind mount to only the files it needs to access. Very Plan9y.)
      - FooBarWidget 14y ago
        It may still be a good idea for security reasons. Suppose that an Nginx process is exploited. If it runs under a certain user ID then the exploit likely does not travel past that user. You can make the Nginx user ID different from the actual user ID so that it only has read access.
- 14y ago
pifflesnort 14y ago
One thing I still don't understand is why one would use a proxy server at all? Why not just have your load balancers (which can operate cheaply at the TCP layer) throw traffic directly at your application servers? If you need caching, that's cheap to do, too. If you need static file serving, can't you another load balancer end-point that points directly at static content servers, or make your application servers faster? Is nginx primarily useful for slow application server runtimes that can't keep up with what nginx can do?
- nacs 14y ago
  nginx can do a ton of things with modules. One of the reasons I use it is because I can pattern match incoming URLs and send them to different servers based on some pretty fancy rules routing rules. Also, there are many that use nginx as the load balancer (including me). Would a TCP load balancer be better? Possibly but it also comes at an additional cost whereas nginx is free and far more flexible with routing HTTP content. I'm not even going to summarize all the other things nginx can do via modules (Lua, memcached, etc -- http://wiki.nginx.org/Modules http://wiki.nginx.org/Modules).
- benhoyt 14y ago
  It's a good question. We (a large-scale website serving 250,000 pages/day) use Python+CherryPy for our "application server", but that's sitting behind an nginx reverse proxy. The main reason is that nginx is much better and faster at handling certain things than Python: * handling HTTPS and serving plain old HTTP to the application server so Python doesn't have to worry about it * doing the gzipping of content before it goes out * routing requests to different places/ports based on various elements matched in the URL or HTTP headers * virtual hosts, i.e., "Host" header matching and routing things to the right place based on that * various request sanitization, like setting client_max_body_size, ignore_invalid_headers, timeouts, etc. Historically we've also had multiple types of application servers, some Python and some C++, and nginx routes requests to the right app server (based mainly on URL prefix). We also use nginx to do GeoIP with the GeoIP nginx module (though arguably that would be just as simple in Python). Edit: Note that we don't use it because our "application server is slow" (it's not). Also, I know some people use nginx to serve static content, because it's usually much faster/better than say Python at doing that -- we serve static content via Amazon S3 and a CDN, so that's a non-issue for us.
marijn 14y ago
Though I do use nginx and am very happy with it, I am somewhat put off by the fact that I reported a bug five months ago (including a working patch for the problem) and no one seems to have as much as looked at it [1]. (Granted, this is in a module, not in the core server, but in general the community process for the project seems messy and vague.) [1]: http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/242 http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/242
- javajosh 14y ago
  Yes, I agree - nginx's community feels a little strange, at least to someone who hasn't tried to really get involved. Apache, by contrast, is a huge, loud, unruly crowd. Whereas the nginx author seems to be one of those quiet, aloof, l337 h4x0r types. Which is consistent with software that is a) really fast and b) not responsive to change requests. :)
sergiotapia 14y ago
I'm a newbie - if I install Passanger to be able to run Rails apps on on Nginx, are these benefits lost? Better yet: What exact is Passanger? (Explain it like I'm five) Their site says, "Phusion Passenger is an application server for Ruby (Rack) and Python (WSGI) apps." - so it's something that runs below Nginx and run Ruby code? Or is it an extension for Nginx/Apache? Thanks!
- FooBarWidget 14y ago
  Phusion Passenger extends Nginx and turns it into an application server. An application server is a program that runs application code, so in this case it allows Nginx to run run Ruby/Python code. Likewise, the Apache version of Phusion Passenger turns Apache into an app server that can run Ruby/Python code. The benefits are not lost. Phusion Passenger integrates into Nginx to give you the benefits of both. For example one of the tasks of Nginx is to buffer HTTP requests and responses in order to protect apps from slow HTTP connections. Phusion Passenger fully makes use of this Nginx feature and even extends it.
- trustfundbaby 14y ago
  > if I install Passanger to be able to run Rails apps on on Nginx, are these benefits lost? No. but you will see the benefits only at a high req/min, because with Apache it would have to spawn new threads to deal with so many requests, taking up memory and other resources, while nginx just sends the requests directly to the passenger instances as needed. basically nginx would use less memory. > What exact is Passanger? passenger is a module that understands and handles rails requests. So when a request comes in to nginx for an image, css or other static asset, nginx will find it and send it back, when the request is for a rails controller/action, then it will send it to a passenger instance to process and then return the results to you hope that helps
bpatrianakos 14y ago
I've used Apache exclusively for the last 3 years until just a few months ago when I set up another server to host a number of sites I wanted to move off Apache and on to Nginx. After having used both, and trying real hard here not to start a religious war as is what happens often in these kinds of discussions, I have to say neither is "better" overall or in general in my experience. If you're familiar with Apache configuration then you should have no problem with Nginx because the way both servers structure their config files is very similar. I prefer Nginx config files however because it feels more like writing JSON whereas Apache config files are like writing XML, especially in the area of virtual hosts. That said, neither is better, its really more about what you're comfortable with and prefer. Nginx had most of the same configuration options and the tough part was figuring out what Nginx calls the corresponding Apache option. For me there was a barely noticeable performance difference with Nginx being faster. The caveat here is that in my case I started moving all of my static sites and sites with "simple" php script type apps over to Nginx and used the apache server for a very few apps that were running more memory and CPU intensive apps. The Nginx server was also new and clean while the apache server had been in use for a great many more things including non-web applications and managing private got repos for about 20 code bases. Nginx did use about 25% less memory in my case than apache even while serving up more sites. I love being able to host multiple SSL sites on a single IP with no hoops to jump through with Nginx. On Apache your options are to acquire more IPs or set up SNI which for me was more hassle than it was worth. So since we're on HN I'm assuming most people are serving Ruby or Python based apps with Nginx or using it as a reverse proxy. That's cool and all but there's still an enormous cross section of the developer community using it to serve php and as I have a lot of sites that were originally built in php my Nginx server needed Php-fastcgi. I mentioned earlier that configuring Nginx was a breeze since most of my apache knowledge transferred over but setting up fastcgi was not a breeze. It's easy to get set up and working but actually understanding what it's doing and if you really do want to configure it in the way whatever online guide shows you is the tough part. On apache you'd just install mod_php5, 'a2enmod' it, and then all you need to worry about is your php.ini file. On Nginx you have the added step of adding a config block to each server block for php. That's easy enough to get the gist of but then you start wondering if you've made the right decision after you read those warnings about improperly setting it up leading to security holes with file uploads and then you start wondering what other options should I know about, should I implement them, etc. Maybe I'm totally misguided here but with mod_php you didn't worry about security. You only worried about the security of your actual code, the server itself (firewalls, ssh, port blocking and all that), and your .ini's. So that was a downside for me but not insurmountable by any means. It's also far easier to find information on apache than Nginx. Nginx has a ton of available support and articles and tutorials out there but most of them cover the same narrow section of topics and are contradictory sometimes. The Nginx wiki itself even has warnings about getting advice from outside the wiki in the Pitfalls section. Of course you need to be careful when sourcing information from the web no matter what the topic but I felt more secure in searching for Apache information than Nginx information. I really love Nginx though. It can really take quite a beating without even batting an eyelash as I've seen. That said, I'll still be using Apache as my "workhorse" server for some time until I can get more Nginx experience under my belt. So I'd say take these testimonials for what they are: just testimonials. True or not, any piece of software worth using can get people to rave about it. What's important is if they're situations, expectations, and needs align with your own.
cmwelsh 14y ago
Can someone give me a small comparison between nginx and HAProxy? It seems like they're starting to overlap a lot. I'm really excited that nginx added Websocket (including SSL termination) support.
- manoleet 14y ago
  I don't think you can compare them
dhruvbird 14y ago
nginx has data structures that scale sub-linearly with the number of requests. this is desirable. others usually don't do things this way.
justjimmy 14y ago
I came across Nginx, for the first time today, when I was trying to figure how to make 'cleaner' URLs for the wiki I'm making. Totally going over my head and out of my comfort zone…what a coincidence this article pops up on HN the same day…maybe it's a sign I need to figure this Nginx thing out. Thanks for the link!
apinstein 14y ago
I think ngninx is likely faster and more stable than apache, but I have yet to see anything close to a trustworthy benchmark. I come from the php world, and people always say how much lower-memory nginx+php-fpm is than apache+mod_php. Well no doubt! If you understand how the architecture actually works, it's clear this isn't a fair comparison. mod_php means php is fully-loaded for serving statics, not to mention having a smaller pool of php-fpm processes will take less memory and also be faster (due to less context-switching) than the larger number of mod_php processes. However the real comparison should be between nginx+php-fpm and apache+mpm_event+php-fpm. Nginx is an evented server, so at least try to compare apples-to-apples. I've seen very few comparisons of nginx with mpm_event. Also, apache's default tunings are much more geared towards modest server usage whereas nginx's seem more geared towards high scalability. An argument could be made that apache should have "better" defaults, but since at scale you need to start tweaking your OS/rlimit/etc to prevent bad things from happening you can see why apache might stick with more modest tunings ootb. Our app has a lot of apache custom config and so I was a hesitant to try to switch to nginx due to the risk of getting things wrong porting the configs. We did move from apache/mod_php to apache+mpm_worker and php-fpm and we've been able to improve throughput (especially on statics) at a far lower memory footprint. Key to success in lowering the memory footprint was dropping ThreadStackSize (from 8M default to 1M). What a difference! Other than that, the competition is good for everyone. I am sure nginx pushed apache to work on mpm_event much harder.
- FooBarWidget 14y ago
  You may want to take a look at http://www.eschrade.com/page/why-is-fastcgi-w-nginx-so-much-faster-than-apache-w-mod_php/ http://www.eschrade.com/page/why-is-fastcgi-w-nginx-so-much-.... The answer might surprise you. As for ThreadStackSize: it impacts virtual memory but not actual memory usage. Actual memory usage stays the same. You should never use the 'vm size' as a good measurement of memory usage. Unfortunately memory management on modern OSes is complicated and people don't understand the numbers, so they arbitrarily pick a column in 'ps' and conclude that X is bloating memory... :(
  - apinstein 14y ago
another_jerk 14y ago
yawn! nginx's ssi capability is so bare currently. however, it is an excellent reverse proxy for me.
slacka 14y ago
I don't care whether it's for anti-wrinkle cream or a web server, I find testimonials about as useful as that ball of lint in my belly button and trustworthy as a used car salesman. It's true many of benchmarks out there use flawed methodologies, so lets try to fix that. When you benchmark something as complex as Apache, people are going to find faults with your initial run, no matter how careful you are. This is why you need to be completely transparent with you setup configuration and should be prepared for a followup run with user suggested settings.
fooooobar 14y ago
Did they steal the Top Gun logo?
manoleet 14y ago
Why not?
strech 14y ago
Benchs: http://blog.inetu.net/2013/01/nginx-vs-apache%E2%80%94which-web-server-is-right-for-your-project/ http://blog.inetu.net/2013/01/nginx-vs-apache%E2%80%94which-... http://blog.celingest.com/en/2013/02/25/nginx-vs-apache-in-aws/ http://blog.celingest.com/en/2013/02/25/nginx-vs-apache-in-a... http://readystate4.com/2012/07/08/nginx-the-non-blocking-model-and-why-apache-sucks/ http://readystate4.com/2012/07/08/nginx-the-non-blocking-mod...

210 points by seclabor 14y ago

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.

thiderman 14y ago
Given that nginx is almost twice as old as redis, shouldn't that analogy rather be "redis is the nginx of databases"? ;)

foohey 14y ago

Fake, these guys are corrupted and benchmarks are rigged :-P </joke> Long live to Nginx !

velodrome 14y ago

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.

mk3 14y ago
Latest version got much better at handling streams if I remember correctly
- velodrome 14y ago
  True. Correct me if I am wrong but I am not sure if streams work for general text pages (like blogs, eCommerce, etc). It is better suited for chat-style applications (comet).

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

simonsarris 14y ago

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!

rlpb 14y ago
> 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.
- StuieK 14y ago
  Still building the "feature comparison" feature but we have the "why use it" pretty much sorted, example: http://slant.co/topics/what-is-the-best-search-engine-for-web-applications/opinions/elasticsearch http://slant.co/topics/what-is-the-best-search-engine-for-we...
- byamit 14y ago
  yeah but you can't ask Product X to tell you about Product Y because they honestly don't know Product Y well enough to speak to it.
  - stedaniels 14y ago
    You have to ask yourself, if your building a product and you know nothing about it's potential competitors, what are you really doing? Research is key my opinion. It avoids cases of "Hey guys, look what I invented! I call it the wheel.."

amalag 14y ago

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.

chubot 14y ago
Oh really, does it do it for POSTs? It should retry for GET, but not POSTs (which is exactly why there is a difference). If you have non-idempotent GETs in your app, then that's the app's fault. If Nginx is retrying POSTs then it's Nginx's fault.
- CrLf 14y ago
  That's a pretty broad statement to make... You are assuming that out there only "your app" exists. Actually, many times "your app" is somebody else's app that you bought or an app that somebody else develops and you don't have any control over it. Sometimes those apps are just bad (well, most enterprise apps are) and your only hope is that the infrastructure that you do happen to control doesn't make it worse. I've never used nginx, so I don't know if the parent has a point or not. However, having a reverse proxy retrying _any_ requests to backends by default seems very bad form to me. Do you want your routers resending packets? It's the same thing.
  - scott_w 14y ago
    If you have an app that completely ignores the HTTP specification like that then you could well have bigger problems. I recall reading about a very popular image website doing exactly that and, when Google attempted to index it, some strange things happened to the images as the web crawler chased down all those "safe" links.
  - unclebucknasty 14y ago
    I agree with that. Automatically resenting requests is not good. Better to simply timeout. And if there are enough timeouts that it's causing a problem, the functionality should be restructured.

jstalin 14y ago

I dropped Apache in favor of Nginx about two years ago. Haven't looked back since then. It's so much easier to configure and it uses far less memory.

dTch7 14y ago
>it uses far less memory One of the main selling points for me. Especially for personal projects, I can go with a more affordable vps plan by using nginx instead of apache.
killerpopiller 14y ago
I am using lighty for that reasons. Can anyone compare lighttpd with nginx performance on small servers like Pis?
- FooBarWidget 14y ago
  I dropped Lighttpd years ago because on some occasions it used 100% CPU for no reason. It didn't make the server crash, and Lighttpd itself appeared to run fine otherwise, but still... the CPU usage was there for no reason. This was never solved, and development also seemed stalled. So I switched away from Lighttpd to Nginx. Nginx just kept working and working, never broke once.

windsurfer 14y ago

Nginx is great, but before you get down and start using it, make certain that you'll never, ever use any features it doesn't support. I was bitten by this when I found out Nginx has no equivalent to Apache's mpm_itk_module.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago
What does that mod do out of curiosity?
- uggedal 14y ago
  "mpm-itk allows you to run each of your vhost under a separate uid and gid—in short, the scripts and configuration files for one vhost no longer have to be readable for all the other vhosts" - http://mpm-itk.sesse.net/ http://mpm-itk.sesse.net/
  - derefr 14y ago
    I don't quite understand why that would be necessary. Nginx has no business accessing other users' files in the first place. I mean, I understand why Apache needs to do it: with Apache, you have things like mod_php running in-process, so it makes sense to restrict Apache, running one of Bob's scripts, from accessing Alice's files. But with Nginx, anything with "intelligence" runs out-of-process. What Nginx expects you to do is to run it as one user, but run each app server (in PHP terms, each FCGI socket daemon) as the user whose files that server should access. (Or, better yet, run the app server in an LXC container along with a bind mount to only the files it needs to access. Very Plan9y.)
    - FooBarWidget 14y ago
      It may still be a good idea for security reasons. Suppose that an Nginx process is exploited. If it runs under a certain user ID then the exploit likely does not travel past that user. You can make the Nginx user ID different from the actual user ID so that it only has read access.
14y ago

pifflesnort 14y ago

One thing I still don't understand is why one would use a proxy server at all? Why not just have your load balancers (which can operate cheaply at the TCP layer) throw traffic directly at your application servers? If you need caching, that's cheap to do, too. If you need static file serving, can't you another load balancer end-point that points directly at static content servers, or make your application servers faster? Is nginx primarily useful for slow application server runtimes that can't keep up with what nginx can do?

nacs 14y ago
nginx can do a ton of things with modules. One of the reasons I use it is because I can pattern match incoming URLs and send them to different servers based on some pretty fancy rules routing rules. Also, there are many that use nginx as the load balancer (including me). Would a TCP load balancer be better? Possibly but it also comes at an additional cost whereas nginx is free and far more flexible with routing HTTP content. I'm not even going to summarize all the other things nginx can do via modules (Lua, memcached, etc -- http://wiki.nginx.org/Modules http://wiki.nginx.org/Modules).
benhoyt 14y ago
It's a good question. We (a large-scale website serving 250,000 pages/day) use Python+CherryPy for our "application server", but that's sitting behind an nginx reverse proxy. The main reason is that nginx is much better and faster at handling certain things than Python: * handling HTTPS and serving plain old HTTP to the application server so Python doesn't have to worry about it * doing the gzipping of content before it goes out * routing requests to different places/ports based on various elements matched in the URL or HTTP headers * virtual hosts, i.e., "Host" header matching and routing things to the right place based on that * various request sanitization, like setting client_max_body_size, ignore_invalid_headers, timeouts, etc. Historically we've also had multiple types of application servers, some Python and some C++, and nginx routes requests to the right app server (based mainly on URL prefix). We also use nginx to do GeoIP with the GeoIP nginx module (though arguably that would be just as simple in Python). Edit: Note that we don't use it because our "application server is slow" (it's not). Also, I know some people use nginx to serve static content, because it's usually much faster/better than say Python at doing that -- we serve static content via Amazon S3 and a CDN, so that's a non-issue for us.

marijn 14y ago

Though I do use nginx and am very happy with it, I am somewhat put off by the fact that I reported a bug five months ago (including a working patch for the problem) and no one seems to have as much as looked at it [1]. (Granted, this is in a module, not in the core server, but in general the community process for the project seems messy and vague.) [1]: http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/242 http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/242

javajosh 14y ago
Yes, I agree - nginx's community feels a little strange, at least to someone who hasn't tried to really get involved. Apache, by contrast, is a huge, loud, unruly crowd. Whereas the nginx author seems to be one of those quiet, aloof, l337 h4x0r types. Which is consistent with software that is a) really fast and b) not responsive to change requests. :)

sergiotapia 14y ago

I'm a newbie - if I install Passanger to be able to run Rails apps on on Nginx, are these benefits lost? Better yet: What exact is Passanger? (Explain it like I'm five) Their site says, "Phusion Passenger is an application server for Ruby (Rack) and Python (WSGI) apps." - so it's something that runs below Nginx and run Ruby code? Or is it an extension for Nginx/Apache? Thanks!

FooBarWidget 14y ago
Phusion Passenger extends Nginx and turns it into an application server. An application server is a program that runs application code, so in this case it allows Nginx to run run Ruby/Python code. Likewise, the Apache version of Phusion Passenger turns Apache into an app server that can run Ruby/Python code. The benefits are not lost. Phusion Passenger integrates into Nginx to give you the benefits of both. For example one of the tasks of Nginx is to buffer HTTP requests and responses in order to protect apps from slow HTTP connections. Phusion Passenger fully makes use of this Nginx feature and even extends it.
trustfundbaby 14y ago
> if I install Passanger to be able to run Rails apps on on Nginx, are these benefits lost? No. but you will see the benefits only at a high req/min, because with Apache it would have to spawn new threads to deal with so many requests, taking up memory and other resources, while nginx just sends the requests directly to the passenger instances as needed. basically nginx would use less memory. > What exact is Passanger? passenger is a module that understands and handles rails requests. So when a request comes in to nginx for an image, css or other static asset, nginx will find it and send it back, when the request is for a rails controller/action, then it will send it to a passenger instance to process and then return the results to you hope that helps

bpatrianakos 14y ago

I've used Apache exclusively for the last 3 years until just a few months ago when I set up another server to host a number of sites I wanted to move off Apache and on to Nginx. After having used both, and trying real hard here not to start a religious war as is what happens often in these kinds of discussions, I have to say neither is "better" overall or in general in my experience. If you're familiar with Apache configuration then you should have no problem with Nginx because the way both servers structure their config files is very similar. I prefer Nginx config files however because it feels more like writing JSON whereas Apache config files are like writing XML, especially in the area of virtual hosts. That said, neither is better, its really more about what you're comfortable with and prefer. Nginx had most of the same configuration options and the tough part was figuring out what Nginx calls the corresponding Apache option. For me there was a barely noticeable performance difference with Nginx being faster. The caveat here is that in my case I started moving all of my static sites and sites with "simple" php script type apps over to Nginx and used the apache server for a very few apps that were running more memory and CPU intensive apps. The Nginx server was also new and clean while the apache server had been in use for a great many more things including non-web applications and managing private got repos for about 20 code bases. Nginx did use about 25% less memory in my case than apache even while serving up more sites. I love being able to host multiple SSL sites on a single IP with no hoops to jump through with Nginx. On Apache your options are to acquire more IPs or set up SNI which for me was more hassle than it was worth. So since we're on HN I'm assuming most people are serving Ruby or Python based apps with Nginx or using it as a reverse proxy. That's cool and all but there's still an enormous cross section of the developer community using it to serve php and as I have a lot of sites that were originally built in php my Nginx server needed Php-fastcgi. I mentioned earlier that configuring Nginx was a breeze since most of my apache knowledge transferred over but setting up fastcgi was not a breeze. It's easy to get set up and working but actually understanding what it's doing and if you really do want to configure it in the way whatever online guide shows you is the tough part. On apache you'd just install mod_php5, 'a2enmod' it, and then all you need to worry about is your php.ini file. On Nginx you have the added step of adding a config block to each server block for php. That's easy enough to get the gist of but then you start wondering if you've made the right decision after you read those warnings about improperly setting it up leading to security holes with file uploads and then you start wondering what other options should I know about, should I implement them, etc. Maybe I'm totally misguided here but with mod_php you didn't worry about security. You only worried about the security of your actual code, the server itself (firewalls, ssh, port blocking and all that), and your .ini's. So that was a downside for me but not insurmountable by any means. It's also far easier to find information on apache than Nginx. Nginx has a ton of available support and articles and tutorials out there but most of them cover the same narrow section of topics and are contradictory sometimes. The Nginx wiki itself even has warnings about getting advice from outside the wiki in the Pitfalls section. Of course you need to be careful when sourcing information from the web no matter what the topic but I felt more secure in searching for Apache information than Nginx information. I really love Nginx though. It can really take quite a beating without even batting an eyelash as I've seen. That said, I'll still be using Apache as my "workhorse" server for some time until I can get more Nginx experience under my belt. So I'd say take these testimonials for what they are: just testimonials. True or not, any piece of software worth using can get people to rave about it. What's important is if they're situations, expectations, and needs align with your own.

cmwelsh 14y ago

Can someone give me a small comparison between nginx and HAProxy? It seems like they're starting to overlap a lot. I'm really excited that nginx added Websocket (including SSL termination) support.

manoleet 14y ago
I don't think you can compare them

dhruvbird 14y ago

nginx has data structures that scale sub-linearly with the number of requests. this is desirable. others usually don't do things this way.

justjimmy 14y ago

I came across Nginx, for the first time today, when I was trying to figure how to make 'cleaner' URLs for the wiki I'm making. Totally going over my head and out of my comfort zone…what a coincidence this article pops up on HN the same day…maybe it's a sign I need to figure this Nginx thing out. Thanks for the link!

apinstein 14y ago

I think ngninx is likely faster and more stable than apache, but I have yet to see anything close to a trustworthy benchmark. I come from the php world, and people always say how much lower-memory nginx+php-fpm is than apache+mod_php. Well no doubt! If you understand how the architecture actually works, it's clear this isn't a fair comparison. mod_php means php is fully-loaded for serving statics, not to mention having a smaller pool of php-fpm processes will take less memory and also be faster (due to less context-switching) than the larger number of mod_php processes. However the real comparison should be between nginx+php-fpm and apache+mpm_event+php-fpm. Nginx is an evented server, so at least try to compare apples-to-apples. I've seen very few comparisons of nginx with mpm_event. Also, apache's default tunings are much more geared towards modest server usage whereas nginx's seem more geared towards high scalability. An argument could be made that apache should have "better" defaults, but since at scale you need to start tweaking your OS/rlimit/etc to prevent bad things from happening you can see why apache might stick with more modest tunings ootb. Our app has a lot of apache custom config and so I was a hesitant to try to switch to nginx due to the risk of getting things wrong porting the configs. We did move from apache/mod_php to apache+mpm_worker and php-fpm and we've been able to improve throughput (especially on statics) at a far lower memory footprint. Key to success in lowering the memory footprint was dropping ThreadStackSize (from 8M default to 1M). What a difference! Other than that, the competition is good for everyone. I am sure nginx pushed apache to work on mpm_event much harder.

FooBarWidget 14y ago
You may want to take a look at http://www.eschrade.com/page/why-is-fastcgi-w-nginx-so-much-faster-than-apache-w-mod_php/ http://www.eschrade.com/page/why-is-fastcgi-w-nginx-so-much-.... The answer might surprise you. As for ThreadStackSize: it impacts virtual memory but not actual memory usage. Actual memory usage stays the same. You should never use the 'vm size' as a good measurement of memory usage. Unfortunately memory management on modern OSes is complicated and people don't understand the numbers, so they arbitrarily pick a column in 'ps' and conclude that X is bloating memory... :(
- apinstein 14y ago

another_jerk 14y ago

yawn! nginx's ssi capability is so bare currently. however, it is an excellent reverse proxy for me.

slacka 14y ago

I don't care whether it's for anti-wrinkle cream or a web server, I find testimonials about as useful as that ball of lint in my belly button and trustworthy as a used car salesman. It's true many of benchmarks out there use flawed methodologies, so lets try to fix that. When you benchmark something as complex as Apache, people are going to find faults with your initial run, no matter how careful you are. This is why you need to be completely transparent with you setup configuration and should be prepared for a followup run with user suggested settings.

fooooobar 14y ago

Did they steal the Top Gun logo?

manoleet 14y ago

Why not?

strech 14y ago

Benchs: http://blog.inetu.net/2013/01/nginx-vs-apache%E2%80%94which-web-server-is-right-for-your-project/ http://blog.inetu.net/2013/01/nginx-vs-apache%E2%80%94which-... http://blog.celingest.com/en/2013/02/25/nginx-vs-apache-in-aws/ http://blog.celingest.com/en/2013/02/25/nginx-vs-apache-in-a... http://readystate4.com/2012/07/08/nginx-the-non-blocking-model-and-why-apache-sucks/ http://readystate4.com/2012/07/08/nginx-the-non-blocking-mod...