11 ms·

We Should Ditch Nginx

111 points by jesalas 13y ago

yeukhon 13y ago
> Who will pick up the mantle and actively develop the next game-changing FOSS web server? We are writing and waiting. I don't mean to be harsh - but if you were to suggest people to ditch nginx, take the initiative and fork it and start doing the support. It's one of those "rants" we hear and nobody does anything. > Getting these NGINX log events into a remote server is easy with rsyslog. But preventing the log events from writing to disk in the first place? And what is the problem with writing to disk? I guess RAM disk is fine? I am not really sure what's the issue with writing to disk. Most of the time it's the application and securing disk more important. I still don't see any convincing argument why we should ditch Nginx. To me all the points so far is about Nginx going commercial.
- kbar13 13y ago
  I think OP's issue is that writing to disk will break his old NetApp install. I don't think it's really that bad to write the local logs to ramdisk and then have the centralized logging system pull the logfiles every so often as a stopgap. VMs are meant to be ephemeral anyways.
  - jlawer 13y ago
    > VMs are meant to be ephemeral anyways. While ephemeral VMs are a great way to operate if your able, I really don't think you can say that your "meant" to operate that way. Many workloads don't fit that model, and certainly a lot of commercial software is of the type that your not going to want to be re-installing too often and going through re-licensing hell.
- ars_technician 13y ago
  >I don't mean to be harsh - but if you were to suggest people to ditch nginx, take the initiative and fork it and start doing the support. Perhaps he doesn't have the hours/skills free to do so. People are free to complain about things or do a 'call-to-arms' about things they can't fix themselves. >And what is the problem with writing to disk? Performance >I guess RAM disk is fine? It works, but it's a hack and major technical debt to hold. > I am not really sure what's the issue with writing to disk. Performance. Specifically the thundering herd problem. All of his servers log to virtual disks all stored on the same SAN, which is stressing under the load. >I still don't see any convincing argument why we should ditch Nginx. It's a bit of a slippery slope fallacy, but the point is that a basic feature is being held hostage behind a pay-wall. It would be like MySQL requiring you to pay to any users other than the 'admin' SQL account.
  - grey-area 13y ago
    Perhaps he doesn't have the hours/skills free to do so. People are free to complain about things or do a 'call-to-arms' about things they can't fix themselves. I think in the case of open source we have far too many people who feel entitled to the work of others without any recompense already. Working on a large OS project like this is mostly a thankless task - people will complain about the problems while taking for granted all the features that just work, and they're unlikely to be raking in lots of money because of attitudes like this. Given the volume of sales, the 3 floor building and the use of NetApp, I would have thought this company has money to pay nginx for what is a core piece of software, even if they have to negotiate a special license or change their setup. If they don't want to or can't, they can use apache, find workarounds, or even patch nginx themselves. Issuing a call to arms over this is pretty obnoxious behaviour, because it implies the nginx people have done something wrong or antisocial in wanting to be paid for some of their work. How outrageous! the point is that a basic feature is being held hostage behind a pay-wall. It would be like MySQL requiring you to pay to any users other than the 'admin' SQL account. Yes, it would be like that (though this feature is more trivial and could be worked around, and is not an existing feature, so not exactly the same). That's the way companies make money when they segment their market and have an OS offering and a commercial one. Nothing wrong with that. If you don't like the rules set by the creators, don't use it; write your own software or use other software. If they had retrospectively retired features and put them into the paid version, perhaps he'd have a point, but as far as I'm aware they haven't. He's not entitled to have the nginx guys work for free forever on his terms on their software. Ending with the exhortation 'Fork it' sums up his position perfectly - someone else should fork this software, add the features I need, and then continue to work for free for me. He's asking 'Who will pick up the mantle', because clearly it won't be him; he's not a sucker after all.
    - ars_technician 13y ago
      >Yes, it would be like that (though this feature is more trivial and could be worked around, and is not an existing feature, so not exactly the same). That's the way companies make money when they segment their market and have an OS offering and a commercial one. Nothing wrong with that. If you don't like the rules set by the creators, don't use it; write your own software or use other software. If they had retrospectively retired features and put them into the paid version, perhaps he'd have a point, but as far as I'm aware they haven't. But what they have done is made a pretty basic marketing mistake. They decided to charge for something that has been 'solved' by apache and hundreds of other pieces of software many years ago. People don't want to pay for something that's not new in the field. >Issuing a call to arms over this is pretty obnoxious behaviour, because it implies the nginx people have done something wrong or antisocial in wanting to be paid for some of their work. How outrageous! You say that like all approaches to making money are the same and it's disingenuous. How about some document editing software that works for free for 30 days and then encrypts all of your files until you pay up? The developers just want to get paid, right? How outrageous! >If you don't like the rules set by the creators, don't use it; write your own software or use other software. That's what he's advocating... >Ending with the exhortation 'Fork it' sums up his position perfectly - someone else should fork this software, add the features I need, and then continue to work for free for me. He's asking 'Who will pick up the mantle', because clearly it won't be him; he's not a sucker after all. That's exactly what good open source foundations do. I take it you are unfamiliar with the apache web server project? What about OpenStack? Maybe Linux or Firefox? None of these projects turn to their users to squeeze money out of them to activate basic features.
thejosh 13y ago
I hate when people whinge about free software...... You didn't pay anything for it, you use it to make money yet you whinge.
- skj 13y ago
  This position is without merit. People have every right to say that one particular free option is not what they're looking for, and explain why it's not what they're looking for.
  - secstate 13y ago
    While I agree with your statement on it's face, in the context of the OP, this is just whinging. The author is not just offering constructive criticism on a possible fork of NGINX, he's calling the NGINX business out for "withholding" features. The tone is distinctly one of being "owed" a feature common to another popular FOSS project, instead of being grateful for everything NGINX provides (which is a lot, and probably why switching to Apache is suggested with some reluctance in the OP).
    - ams6110 13y ago
      And using it for his own commercial purposes to boot. Really comes across as a crybaby.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      This part of FOSS culture I really dislike as a developer. Many people seem to consider an offence that other developers need to make a living, instead of being grateful of being able to sell stuff using software they haven't paid a dime for. Then become outraged when the developers come to the conclusion that the baker won't sell bread for pull requests. This is what moved me into the direction of suggesting dual license for open source projects, every time someone consults me on it.
      - ars_technician 13y ago
        What you are suggesting is the part of a greedy FOSS project. One that enjoys the external open source contributions, yet still charges for features in the software. It's disgusting and an insult to your contributors, unless you pay them all money as well. There is nothing wrong with making money, but don't to it with sleazy tactics like this that put you in a conflict of interest. Charge for support or a hosted version, but don't artificially cripple the software. If you do want to go that way, don't be open source at all because you are just a leech on the community.
Gigablah 13y ago
> Fork it. Well, there's a fork of nginx called Tengine, made by the Taobao folks: http://tengine.taobao.org/document/http_log.html http://tengine.taobao.org/document/http_log.html
- voltagex_ 13y ago
  From a (very) brief glance, it looks like you could almost pull this code back into the open source version on nginx. https://github.com/alibaba/tengine/blob/master/src/http/modules/ngx_http_log_module.c https://github.com/alibaba/tengine/blob/master/src/http/modu...
secstate 13y ago
Sigh. FOSS and NGINX as an example of FOSS have given us so much. If direct to syslog logging is what you're after, why not use Apache? As many people have pointed out before, Apache can certainly be hold a candle to NGINX if you put the time into tuning it. If you're expecting Black Friday traffic of this magnitude, and you haven't spent the last two months planning and load testing for it, you are either lazy or underpaid. If the first, okay, I get why you don't want to roll your own RPM. If the second, that's just what this business can expect out of their setup. No one is going to dump NGINX over this. If it is this mission critical to your business, pony up and pay for NGINX. > We’re using php-fpm anyway; the performance difference between nginx and httpd in this scenario is negligible. So why are we even having this discussion? Honestly if you're experiencing that much traffic and PHP performance is hindering you, you should consider some sort of Varnish full-page caching anyhow. Disk writes, as you note, are not your primary issue, and certainly is no reason to dump NGINX.
- ars_technician 13y ago
  >No one is going to dump NGINX over this. His post seems to contradict that. People will dump products for very trivial reasons if marketed correctly.
  - Semiapies 13y ago
    Reading this post, I'd assume that this time next year, if the company is still there and this guy still has this job, they'll still be using nginx. Someone dropping this sort of frustrated blog post about how his company should dump it probably doesn't have the authority to make that call or the motivation and time to make it happen if he does. The whole tone of the blog post is passive-aggressive, whether directed at the makers of nginx (for wanting to get paid), or at the end, towards some hypothetical people who take it upon themselves to build a fork that suits all his needs (despite his not actually needing such a fork). Such a tone suggests that he feels powerless.
Mikeb85 13y ago
Then ditch it and move on. If everyone made a post every time they chose not to buy X product but instead to use Y product then HN would be unreadable. You have the source, patch/fork it. If you're too lazy/not skilled enough, switch to Apache and don't tell us about it.
- twelve40 13y ago
  Although I share your sentiment, noc and devops people are legitimately paranoid about stability, so no, he's neither lazy nor unskilled - this part I can easily believe. What I can't understand is, if they have tons of traffic and he admittedly uses a product he likes, why doesn't he just pay for it. FOSS does not enslave its authors to perpetually provide free infinite scalability for every use case.
  - Mikeb85 13y ago
    Very true. Forgot to mention that part. Why not pay for a great product if you find it useful. I've paid for FOSS stuff before, and supported distros I use...
    - ars_technician 13y ago
      Price restriction in this case. 100 vms * $1300 a VM = a big pile of cash that wasn't in the budget.
dreamdu5t 13y ago
You can compile nginx with syslog support with this module https://github.com/yaoweibin/nginx_syslog_patch https://github.com/yaoweibin/nginx_syslog_patch and avoid writing to disk. syslog is still blocking though.
adrianlmm 13y ago
You get so much from NGINX and yout don't want to pay? The world has gone crazy.
kh_hk 13y ago
Maybe this would be steering out of the point, but doesn't something like collectd suit the problem?
ridruejo 13y ago
Apache 2.4 with event MPM should give you comparable performance to nginx
- TylerE 13y ago
  Looks more like a factor of 2 difference to me: http://blog.zhuzhaoyuan.com/2012/02/apache-24-faster-than-nginx/ http://blog.zhuzhaoyuan.com/2012/02/apache-24-faster-than-ng...
  - delian66 13y ago
    The article's actual title is "Apache 2.4 Faster Than Nginx?" . As most articles having a question mark at the end of their title, not surprisingly the answer is "no" ... Quoting from the article itself: >> It turned out that it’s a false claim. Apache 2.4 is actually much slower than Nginx!
    - TylerE 13y ago
      Yes, that's what I said. It's a factor of two slower than nginx
- DigitalSea 13y ago
  Performance is pretty good in Apache 2.4, but compare RAM usage alongside NGINX and you'll notice that NGINX's event based threads approach takes a big dump all over Apache's separate process lets consume every bit of available RAM the server has until it starts throwing errors and filling log files. Apache is getting better, but it's not really on par with NGINX (yet, but it will be).
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    You didn't hear what he said, he's specifically not talking about the memory hogging process bases mpm. You seem to think Apache only works that way, but the worker modules are pluggable.
davidu 13y ago
I'm curious what business model the author of the post thinks would be possible for the author of nginx and not result in this scenario for feature x/y/z? Also, as an aside, it seems like the author of the post pays for NetApp and the very, very expensive support contracts that come with it, nginx contracts are a walk in the park, financially, in comparison.
- rodgerd 13y ago
  > I'm curious what business model the author of the post thinks would be possible for the author of nginx and not result in this scenario for feature x/y/z? The author presumably belongs to the same cohort who download films and music without paying and sneers "how you feed yourself isn't my problem, go sell some t-shirts or something". I doubt the author gives a shit, they just want stuff for free, so they can continue to make money with it.
gkoberger 13y ago
Given the name of the blog (and how it's written), I assume this is meant to be satire?
- thepicard 13y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law "Poe's law, named after its author Nathan Poe, is an Internet adage reflecting the idea that without a clear indication of the author's intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism." Edit: excerpt
- trimbo 13y ago
  It is not in terms of the content: "Logging to syslog is available as part of our commercial subscription only." http://nginx.org/en/docs/ngx_core_module.html#error_log http://nginx.org/en/docs/ngx_core_module.html#error_log
  - gkoberger 13y ago
    "Satire" doesn't mean "false" or "fake".
- user-id 13y ago
  Given the content of at least 1 other related site hosted on the same IP (simulantproductions.com), I think it's fair to say this article is satire and should be considered flamebait. http://viewdns.info/reverseip/?host=www.hipyoungstartup.com&t=1 http://viewdns.info/reverseip/?host=www.hipyoungstartup.com&... The three other websites mention the same people so it's fair to say the fourth is just another project of theirs.
oijaf888 13y ago
Given it seems to be a product of http://www.simulantproductions.com/ http://www.simulantproductions.com/ is this just satire or link bait?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
DigitalSea 13y ago
I can't tell if this post is serious or not (the domain name throws me off a little). I use NGINX myself, but I am also aware that Apache is playing catchup quite quickly as well and Apache 5.4 is a decent version of the popular open source server. Use whatever fits your needs, just because it didn't fit your needs doesn't mean you should go forcing your opinion upon others. Many people including myself have had nothing but great experiences using NGINX and I don't actually see any real argument here to stop using NGINX. Based on the tone of the article I get the kind of vibe that the author has the "I liked this band before they became mainstream" mentality about software. NGINX deserves all of the money they can get, they have a great product that is worth paying for and it's quite usuable without paying a cent, so I don't understand what there is to complain about.
- davidw 13y ago
  Apache httpd is at version 2.4.7: http://httpd.apache.org/ http://httpd.apache.org/
  - DigitalSea 13y ago
    I had MySQL on the mind obviously. I meant 2.4, thanks for point it out though!
jacques_chester 13y ago
This blog post demonstrates why the syslog feature is ideal for segmenting Nginx's market. Almost nobody cares about it, except the sort of place doing > tens of millions of requests per day. The sort of place that might have some money and the scale to realise that a few thousand bucks is cheaper than a bunch of engineer time. It's a good case study in smart pricing.
- icambron 13y ago
  This. From the article: >I don’t blame NGINX for wanting money in exchange for what is admittedly amazing software. I just don’t want any part of it. Why not? You're using this awesome software whose value you appreciate and which is, you admit, open source. It's just not convenient enough for you. So why can't you pony up the money for your huge, high-traffic website?
  - jesalas 13y ago
    It's pretty simple actually: We don't have an HTTP server software budget. The expectation is that the tech team will choose the right tools for the job and ask for paid tools when we need them (eg. New Relic). NGINX doesn't differentiate enough from the other HTTP servers out there to justify the cost.
    - jacques_chester 13y ago
      > NGINX doesn't differentiate enough from the other HTTP servers out there to justify the cost. Then why the angst? This just makes me more confused about what your argument is.
      - makomk 13y ago
        What angst? That post reads more like a warning to others to me - after all, if they'd been aware of this issue from the start, they could've just used Apache from the beginning and avoided the hassle of having to migrate.
      - 13y ago
mythz 13y ago
Sigh, another example of the worst thing about OSS - privileged, self-entitled users thinking the world owes them something.
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  OSS has nothing to do with it. Some people are just jerks. They're the same people who are problem customers for products they pay for too, and probably the same people cutting you off in traffic and not tipping their waiter when they go out to dinner.
- ars_technician 13y ago
  They aren't self-entitled if the project has any sense of community and has accepted external contributions of code/documentation/etc. Lots of external hours go into projects like this and moves like these are myopic and generally a big 'screw-you' to active external contributors.
  - mythz 13y ago
    External contributors are usually not the problem, since they're intimately familiar with the project and know just how much time and effort the core team invests in it to keep it running. Contributors that have had a positive impact are usually given free commercial licenses, thanking them for their efforts. The 'screw you contributors' is a common argument used by self-entitled users to try and shame core maintainers into continuing to devote all their future efforts, giving away all their future time and IP away for free - just so they can continue their unfettered use of everything they make, and for them to continue to provide support, so that end-user commercial products can continue to benefit from all their future efforts, uncompensated.
cbsmith 13y ago
Really, it isn't too hard to patch the logging in nginx and/or have a named pipe that writes to syslog. My team made a patch to have it log to UDP multicast, and it wasn't too bad. If you're really pissed at the nginx guys, contribute the patch back. Sure, I quibble with their approach to a commercial model, but I really think this is a case of "me thinks she doth protest too much" in both the literal and implied meaning.
- donavanm 13y ago
  > Really, it isn't too hard to patch the logging in nginx and/or have a named pipe that writes to syslog. Be careful with high performance expectations on named pipes. The fifo is in memory, but the inode is on disk. It really sucks to block on stat() and friends when you dont expect it. Oh! And those FIFOs act as a 64kb buffer. Need more buffering? Put another pipe on it!
  - cbsmith 13y ago
    syslog is also a syscall, and has limited buffering. A named pipe can actually potentially amortize overhead more effectively. (And just because an inode is involved does not mean that a call to stat() involves a trip to disk.) If you are really worried about buffering, you can always have a consumer of the named pipe with its own buffering before writing to syslog (yes, that can get ugly). In a perfect world, I'd actually prefer to write to a ring buffer in shared memory (one per worker to avoid too much contention) and then have another process that empties it as fast as it can. Either way, it's actually not that hard to hack in to nginx. If someone were to contribute a patch that did logging the "right" way and host it on say... github, I think you'd find the nginx commercial folks would have a response that works out pretty well for everyone. The catch is, it requires someone to do something.
- ars_technician 13y ago
  They wouldn't take it because it competes with the enterprise features. Do you see why this model is fundamentally incompatible with open source now?
wereHamster 13y ago
Why not log into a pipe where syslog-ng listens on the other end?
cassianoaquino 13y ago
why not pointing access_log/error_log to fifos and use rsyslog/syslog-ng to read direct from it?
deleted 13y ago
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dknecht 13y ago
CloudFlare generates 50gb/s of logs globally and have handled collecting this volume in two ways. Historically the logs are sent to a local syslog-ng through the use of a PIPE and the forwarded to central logger. This can be done with nginx with no patches by just treating the PIPE as file. Just make sure you do a little buffering inside nginx. access_log /dev/nginx_access log_format_name buffer=64k flush=10s; Since this is a pipe there is still some blocking IO, but no worse off then writing to local file. The way we are migrating will be non-blocking IO through the use of Lua Resty log module ( https://github.com/cloudflare/lua-resty-logger-socket https://github.com/cloudflare/lua-resty-logger-socket ). We will write up a blog post at some point but hopefully this is useful to you. In the future we are going to be going one step further and have NGINX emit protobuff files. Feel free to email dane AT cloudflare.com if you have any questions.
- justincormack 13y ago
  yes Openresty is the big part of the Nginx ecosystem that is outside the Nginx company and provides a completely different way of adding features.
- kevinastone 13y ago
  +1 on that eventual blog post.
- chrissnell 13y ago
  Apologies everyone for the somewhat o/t question here but, what do you guys do with your 50Gb of logs every second? Where do they go after they leave nginx?
  - sbierwagen 13y ago
    To the NSA, presumably: http://exiledonline.com/read-yasha-levines-introduction-to-the-crypto-spy-service-cloudflare-isucker-big-brother-internet-culture/ http://exiledonline.com/read-yasha-levines-introduction-to-t...
    - grey-area 13y ago
neya 13y ago
Not relating to the Author's opinion, I would just like to know if there's a legitimate, competent competitor to Nginx apart from Apache? Just curious as I've already had a bad experience with monopolies in the past.
- oomkiller 13y ago
  http://cherokee-project.com/ http://cherokee-project.com/ and http://www.lighttpd.net/ http://www.lighttpd.net/ are the only other ones I've heard of, and they seem to have their own niche they target. There is also https://github.com/okws/okws https://github.com/okws/okws. I'm sure there are many more, but none of them have sizable market share, especially compared to nginx/apache.
- jaytaylor 13y ago
  HAProxy[0] has fit the bill for me in many instances. [0] http://haproxy.1wt.eu/ http://haproxy.1wt.eu/
  - orthecreedence 13y ago
    Just want to mention that HAProxy isn't a web server like nginx, but a proxy. So while it competes at some things nginx is commonly used for, its not a full competitor (you wouldn't replace nginx+php-fpm w/ HAProxy+php-fpm). That said, if you're looking for a proxy/load balancer, HAProxy is most likely the absolute best you're going to find anywhere, ever...and the price is right ;)
- mfjordvald 13y ago
  There's a fork of nginx, called tengine, maintained by the people at Alibaba. http://tengine.taobao.org/ http://tengine.taobao.org/ Conveniently this would support the authors requirements of syslog feature.
ajclark 13y ago
I wonder if: A) The author is using a load balancer that can do centralised logging in a sane fashion perhaps they can turn off end logging on nginx all together. B) The author has looked in to the Lua nginx scripting capabilities for direct logging without touching disk. C) Place a greater emphasis on SaaS logging with javascript on the client side. It sounds as if their architecture needs a massive re-think.
deleted 13y ago
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vacri 13y ago
... so write to a named pipe instead of the disk?
Rantenki 13y ago
It's $1350/server per year to pay for the feature. You mention in your post: "Our noble HTTP server". Wait. Not plural? I know that a that is a fair bit of money for a bootstrapped startup, but if you are anticipating enough traffic that the syslog feature is an issue, AND you have at least three floors of offices (as mentioned in your blog post), then maybe your OPEX prioritization is a bit off, and you should just pony up. Nginx is a great piece of software for $no dollars, maybe it would be good karma to pay for the extras you need?
- ars_technician 13y ago
  Yes, $1350/server per year * 100 VMs which just broker requests from clients to php-fpm. Totally reasonable. /s For that price, they could pay someone who's sole job is to maintain a private fork with the feature. It's not like they can submit it back since nginx would reject an enterprise competing patch, but at least they would have the functionality and the benefit of another dev on hand.
  - rhino444 13y ago
    So is that about the pricing or the closed source? Would it be different if the pricing was something else? Just curious. Also, like quite a few people pointed out, why not request "the best pricing" given certain deployment scenario?
jesalas 13y ago
Hi everyone, I certainly didn't expect this strong of a response! I wrote the blog post as more of a slice-of-tech-life brain dump or request for comments/ideas. I certainly won't suggest that everyone should ditch NGINX, but it has possibly run its course for us. As I mentioned, I think that NGINX is an amazing piece of software. It's actually powering the very site where I complained about it. I just can't justify recommending licenses for it at work when we don't do anything with it that Apache httpd couldn't do for free. You guys are right, The Site is poorly designed and suffers from a lot of architectural flaws. That's why I have a job in the first place! It's been a long journey getting to where we are and there's a lot more to do. Thanks to everyone for the opinions and ideas!
mrmincent 13y ago
So these guys have one of the biggest days of their year coming up, seem to be running a large operation, and are only just realising this now. You get what you pay for, and from the sounds of it they haven't paid much.
happywolf 13y ago
Given the magnitude of the traffic, I assume the revenue will be proportional. What to bitch about of paying for something that adds value to one's business?
nso 13y ago
It's never "impossible" to avoid disk writes. I'm assuming it's running on Linux, and in that case you could simply log to a shm mount. Since Linux is file-based, it really doesn't care what medium it stores the file on. Ofc. you'll have to handle a couple of potential pitfalls, like running out of shm, but I think this should be much easier than ditching nginx altogether. Linux was made for hacking, so hack away.
vertis 13y ago
I do find it a little amusing that the author doesn't want to pay and doesn't want to do it himself. FOSS is two sided, this is the perfect opportunity to contribute. FWIW, It's really not that hard to build your own RPM/DEB
pnt 13y ago
Nginx can log to stdout (access_log /dev/stdout) and be piped to a program that reads from stdin and forwards to rsyslog. Technical workarounds aside, the blog author should get approval from his manager/ceo to purchase commercial nginx. I don't see what's unreasonable about a profitable business paying for a useful commercial feature.
danenania 13y ago
Why is this getting upvoted? We should ditch Nginx because they are trying to build a sustainable business on top of their amazing OSS contribution? When quality OSS projects like Nginx turn into profitable businesses, that's very good for OSS as a whole. We should be cheering them and gasp paying them if we need their high end features, not abandoning them.
- GhotiFish 13y ago
  sensible right up until they start rejecting patches for needed features because they conflict with commercial goals. There's a legitimate conflict of interest here.
  - fsniper 13y ago
    No you can always fork. That's a business they have the right to accept or reject patches however they like.
    - makomk 13y ago
      Yeah, and other businesses have the right to conclude that they'd rather use a full-featured open source web server than one that's crippled to create a market for the expensive proprietary version. Of course, some people in this discussion seem to disagree - I've seen a lot of people acting as though it's somehow unfair to nginx for him to point this out to other potential nginx users or to switch to a different server rather thay paying up. It's like people here think the nginx developers have some right to bait people in with the open source version and then charge vast sums for basic features, and that anyone who isn't onboard with this scheme is greedy.
      - Mikeb85 13y ago
        They're giving away high quality software for free, with the source code, and a liberal open source licence. They don't owe anyone shit...
rdtsc 13y ago
Ok, fight fire with fire (inflammatory post with inflammatory response) here it goes: Scumbag Hipster Young Startup -- with a 3 floor building (mentioned CEO coming down all the way from the 3rd floor), aggregating 50M events related to sales every day, taking advantage of hundreds of thousands of volunteered man hours put into the FOSS stack they are using, are throwing a hissy fit about having to pay the creators of the software they are using for an enterprise feature.
- ars_technician 13y ago
  Is this money going to the external contributors as well? Volunteers that submitted patches, tests, and documentation?
  - lsaferite 13y ago
    Arguably you are paying for a license that covers support and the ADDITIONAL functionality. Everyone still has free access to the core code that people contributed towards. If they were to take contributed code and lock it behind a commercial license, THEN you could get all uppity.
    - redblacktree 13y ago
      Others are pointing out that they routinely reject these features in the FOSS offering, citing a conflict with the enterprise edition. That's the worst part of this, imo.
      - lsaferite 13y ago
        I don't disagree, but my point is that the code people freely contributed prior to this change is still freely available to the public. If they are rejecting patches for features that impinge on their enterprise offerings and you have an issue with how the project is run now, you are welcome to not contribute, fork, or use another project.
        13y ago
krenoten 13y ago
If you don't want it to hit disk, why don't you just not log to disk? Are you running a unix variant? There are several ways to do this. Why not log to /dev/shm or a pipe, instead of changing nginx? Rsyslog is also probably not the best choice for high volume log aggregation. It performs an rpc per message. That sucks. Use something that batches, like scribe.
- kul_ 13y ago
  I agree, If you are aggregating logs so small that they can fit into memory, most likely that you do not care where it goes. Otoh if the logs are enormous you must have robust periodic log aggregation jobs like map reduce to do that and it is must to have logs on disk. Moreover 50m/day is ~ 578/sec , which isn't huge for a cluster of servers.
embro 13y ago
It's open source. If your company lives from the web traffic, hire a coder to patch it or just pay for it. There is also other solutions like Cherokee web server and Lighthttpd.
youngtaff 13y ago
As an interesting aside… If someone contributes code for a feature that ends up in the commercial product, are they stuck with the options of paying the annual per license fee, or compiling their own code to get the feature?
- voretaq7 13y ago
  Basically, yes.
Nodex 13y ago
Cry a larger river? You choose to install VIA RPM. As everyone says "fork it yourself". You're honestly boycotting the great speed and performance of Nginx due to being lazy. In fairness their support staff are a bunch of tossers (one in particular - you know who you are) but it's a great web server period
kolev 13y ago
Nginx Pro is a bit expensive. I haven't looked into their licensing, but usually with paid software, the biggest issue is activating licenses and stuff, which can't work nicely with autoscaling. One example is when wanted to buy the commercial version of s3fs back in the day - it required running some tool on your server and emailing the guy the hardware signature so that he can email you a key for that server. I'm not saying this is the case with Nginx, but in general, the more strict you make your licensing, the less revenue you're gonna collect. FOSS that charges you for extra features is pretty much doomed - nobody wants to use the less capable version and subconsciously or consciously starts looking for alternatives. Charging for support I truly accept - that's the way to go and it keeps the attitude positive.

111 points by jesalas 13y ago

> Who will pick up the mantle and actively develop the next game-changing FOSS web server? We are writing and waiting. I don't mean to be harsh - but if you were to suggest people to ditch nginx, take the initiative and fork it and start doing the support. It's one of those "rants" we hear and nobody does anything. > Getting these NGINX log events into a remote server is easy with rsyslog. But preventing the log events from writing to disk in the first place? And what is the problem with writing to disk? I guess RAM disk is fine? I am not really sure what's the issue with writing to disk. Most of the time it's the application and securing disk more important. I still don't see any convincing argument why we should ditch Nginx. To me all the points so far is about Nginx going commercial.

kbar13 13y ago
I think OP's issue is that writing to disk will break his old NetApp install. I don't think it's really that bad to write the local logs to ramdisk and then have the centralized logging system pull the logfiles every so often as a stopgap. VMs are meant to be ephemeral anyways.
- jlawer 13y ago
  > VMs are meant to be ephemeral anyways. While ephemeral VMs are a great way to operate if your able, I really don't think you can say that your "meant" to operate that way. Many workloads don't fit that model, and certainly a lot of commercial software is of the type that your not going to want to be re-installing too often and going through re-licensing hell.
ars_technician 13y ago
>I don't mean to be harsh - but if you were to suggest people to ditch nginx, take the initiative and fork it and start doing the support. Perhaps he doesn't have the hours/skills free to do so. People are free to complain about things or do a 'call-to-arms' about things they can't fix themselves. >And what is the problem with writing to disk? Performance >I guess RAM disk is fine? It works, but it's a hack and major technical debt to hold. > I am not really sure what's the issue with writing to disk. Performance. Specifically the thundering herd problem. All of his servers log to virtual disks all stored on the same SAN, which is stressing under the load. >I still don't see any convincing argument why we should ditch Nginx. It's a bit of a slippery slope fallacy, but the point is that a basic feature is being held hostage behind a pay-wall. It would be like MySQL requiring you to pay to any users other than the 'admin' SQL account.
- grey-area 13y ago
  Perhaps he doesn't have the hours/skills free to do so. People are free to complain about things or do a 'call-to-arms' about things they can't fix themselves. I think in the case of open source we have far too many people who feel entitled to the work of others without any recompense already. Working on a large OS project like this is mostly a thankless task - people will complain about the problems while taking for granted all the features that just work, and they're unlikely to be raking in lots of money because of attitudes like this. Given the volume of sales, the 3 floor building and the use of NetApp, I would have thought this company has money to pay nginx for what is a core piece of software, even if they have to negotiate a special license or change their setup. If they don't want to or can't, they can use apache, find workarounds, or even patch nginx themselves. Issuing a call to arms over this is pretty obnoxious behaviour, because it implies the nginx people have done something wrong or antisocial in wanting to be paid for some of their work. How outrageous! the point is that a basic feature is being held hostage behind a pay-wall. It would be like MySQL requiring you to pay to any users other than the 'admin' SQL account. Yes, it would be like that (though this feature is more trivial and could be worked around, and is not an existing feature, so not exactly the same). That's the way companies make money when they segment their market and have an OS offering and a commercial one. Nothing wrong with that. If you don't like the rules set by the creators, don't use it; write your own software or use other software. If they had retrospectively retired features and put them into the paid version, perhaps he'd have a point, but as far as I'm aware they haven't. He's not entitled to have the nginx guys work for free forever on his terms on their software. Ending with the exhortation 'Fork it' sums up his position perfectly - someone else should fork this software, add the features I need, and then continue to work for free for me. He's asking 'Who will pick up the mantle', because clearly it won't be him; he's not a sucker after all.
  - ars_technician 13y ago
    >Yes, it would be like that (though this feature is more trivial and could be worked around, and is not an existing feature, so not exactly the same). That's the way companies make money when they segment their market and have an OS offering and a commercial one. Nothing wrong with that. If you don't like the rules set by the creators, don't use it; write your own software or use other software. If they had retrospectively retired features and put them into the paid version, perhaps he'd have a point, but as far as I'm aware they haven't. But what they have done is made a pretty basic marketing mistake. They decided to charge for something that has been 'solved' by apache and hundreds of other pieces of software many years ago. People don't want to pay for something that's not new in the field. >Issuing a call to arms over this is pretty obnoxious behaviour, because it implies the nginx people have done something wrong or antisocial in wanting to be paid for some of their work. How outrageous! You say that like all approaches to making money are the same and it's disingenuous. How about some document editing software that works for free for 30 days and then encrypts all of your files until you pay up? The developers just want to get paid, right? How outrageous! >If you don't like the rules set by the creators, don't use it; write your own software or use other software. That's what he's advocating... >Ending with the exhortation 'Fork it' sums up his position perfectly - someone else should fork this software, add the features I need, and then continue to work for free for me. He's asking 'Who will pick up the mantle', because clearly it won't be him; he's not a sucker after all. That's exactly what good open source foundations do. I take it you are unfamiliar with the apache web server project? What about OpenStack? Maybe Linux or Firefox? None of these projects turn to their users to squeeze money out of them to activate basic features.

thejosh 13y ago

I hate when people whinge about free software...... You didn't pay anything for it, you use it to make money yet you whinge.

skj 13y ago
This position is without merit. People have every right to say that one particular free option is not what they're looking for, and explain why it's not what they're looking for.
- secstate 13y ago
  While I agree with your statement on it's face, in the context of the OP, this is just whinging. The author is not just offering constructive criticism on a possible fork of NGINX, he's calling the NGINX business out for "withholding" features. The tone is distinctly one of being "owed" a feature common to another popular FOSS project, instead of being grateful for everything NGINX provides (which is a lot, and probably why switching to Apache is suggested with some reluctance in the OP).
  - ams6110 13y ago
    And using it for his own commercial purposes to boot. Really comes across as a crybaby.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    This part of FOSS culture I really dislike as a developer. Many people seem to consider an offence that other developers need to make a living, instead of being grateful of being able to sell stuff using software they haven't paid a dime for. Then become outraged when the developers come to the conclusion that the baker won't sell bread for pull requests. This is what moved me into the direction of suggesting dual license for open source projects, every time someone consults me on it.
    - ars_technician 13y ago
      What you are suggesting is the part of a greedy FOSS project. One that enjoys the external open source contributions, yet still charges for features in the software. It's disgusting and an insult to your contributors, unless you pay them all money as well. There is nothing wrong with making money, but don't to it with sleazy tactics like this that put you in a conflict of interest. Charge for support or a hosted version, but don't artificially cripple the software. If you do want to go that way, don't be open source at all because you are just a leech on the community.

Gigablah 13y ago

> Fork it. Well, there's a fork of nginx called Tengine, made by the Taobao folks: http://tengine.taobao.org/document/http_log.html http://tengine.taobao.org/document/http_log.html

voltagex_ 13y ago
From a (very) brief glance, it looks like you could almost pull this code back into the open source version on nginx. https://github.com/alibaba/tengine/blob/master/src/http/modules/ngx_http_log_module.c https://github.com/alibaba/tengine/blob/master/src/http/modu...

secstate 13y ago

Sigh. FOSS and NGINX as an example of FOSS have given us so much. If direct to syslog logging is what you're after, why not use Apache? As many people have pointed out before, Apache can certainly be hold a candle to NGINX if you put the time into tuning it. If you're expecting Black Friday traffic of this magnitude, and you haven't spent the last two months planning and load testing for it, you are either lazy or underpaid. If the first, okay, I get why you don't want to roll your own RPM. If the second, that's just what this business can expect out of their setup. No one is going to dump NGINX over this. If it is this mission critical to your business, pony up and pay for NGINX. > We’re using php-fpm anyway; the performance difference between nginx and httpd in this scenario is negligible. So why are we even having this discussion? Honestly if you're experiencing that much traffic and PHP performance is hindering you, you should consider some sort of Varnish full-page caching anyhow. Disk writes, as you note, are not your primary issue, and certainly is no reason to dump NGINX.

ars_technician 13y ago
>No one is going to dump NGINX over this. His post seems to contradict that. People will dump products for very trivial reasons if marketed correctly.
- Semiapies 13y ago
  Reading this post, I'd assume that this time next year, if the company is still there and this guy still has this job, they'll still be using nginx. Someone dropping this sort of frustrated blog post about how his company should dump it probably doesn't have the authority to make that call or the motivation and time to make it happen if he does. The whole tone of the blog post is passive-aggressive, whether directed at the makers of nginx (for wanting to get paid), or at the end, towards some hypothetical people who take it upon themselves to build a fork that suits all his needs (despite his not actually needing such a fork). Such a tone suggests that he feels powerless.

Mikeb85 13y ago

Then ditch it and move on. If everyone made a post every time they chose not to buy X product but instead to use Y product then HN would be unreadable. You have the source, patch/fork it. If you're too lazy/not skilled enough, switch to Apache and don't tell us about it.

twelve40 13y ago
Although I share your sentiment, noc and devops people are legitimately paranoid about stability, so no, he's neither lazy nor unskilled - this part I can easily believe. What I can't understand is, if they have tons of traffic and he admittedly uses a product he likes, why doesn't he just pay for it. FOSS does not enslave its authors to perpetually provide free infinite scalability for every use case.
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  Very true. Forgot to mention that part. Why not pay for a great product if you find it useful. I've paid for FOSS stuff before, and supported distros I use...
  - ars_technician 13y ago
    Price restriction in this case. 100 vms * $1300 a VM = a big pile of cash that wasn't in the budget.

dreamdu5t 13y ago

You can compile nginx with syslog support with this module https://github.com/yaoweibin/nginx_syslog_patch https://github.com/yaoweibin/nginx_syslog_patch and avoid writing to disk. syslog is still blocking though.

adrianlmm 13y ago

You get so much from NGINX and yout don't want to pay? The world has gone crazy.

kh_hk 13y ago

Maybe this would be steering out of the point, but doesn't something like collectd suit the problem?

ridruejo 13y ago

Apache 2.4 with event MPM should give you comparable performance to nginx

TylerE 13y ago
Looks more like a factor of 2 difference to me: http://blog.zhuzhaoyuan.com/2012/02/apache-24-faster-than-nginx/ http://blog.zhuzhaoyuan.com/2012/02/apache-24-faster-than-ng...
- delian66 13y ago
  The article's actual title is "Apache 2.4 Faster Than Nginx?" . As most articles having a question mark at the end of their title, not surprisingly the answer is "no" ... Quoting from the article itself: >> It turned out that it’s a false claim. Apache 2.4 is actually much slower than Nginx!
  - TylerE 13y ago
    Yes, that's what I said. It's a factor of two slower than nginx
DigitalSea 13y ago
Performance is pretty good in Apache 2.4, but compare RAM usage alongside NGINX and you'll notice that NGINX's event based threads approach takes a big dump all over Apache's separate process lets consume every bit of available RAM the server has until it starts throwing errors and filling log files. Apache is getting better, but it's not really on par with NGINX (yet, but it will be).
- gnaritas 13y ago
  You didn't hear what he said, he's specifically not talking about the memory hogging process bases mpm. You seem to think Apache only works that way, but the worker modules are pluggable.

davidu 13y ago

I'm curious what business model the author of the post thinks would be possible for the author of nginx and not result in this scenario for feature x/y/z? Also, as an aside, it seems like the author of the post pays for NetApp and the very, very expensive support contracts that come with it, nginx contracts are a walk in the park, financially, in comparison.

rodgerd 13y ago
> I'm curious what business model the author of the post thinks would be possible for the author of nginx and not result in this scenario for feature x/y/z? The author presumably belongs to the same cohort who download films and music without paying and sneers "how you feed yourself isn't my problem, go sell some t-shirts or something". I doubt the author gives a shit, they just want stuff for free, so they can continue to make money with it.

gkoberger 13y ago

Given the name of the blog (and how it's written), I assume this is meant to be satire?

thepicard 13y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law "Poe's law, named after its author Nathan Poe, is an Internet adage reflecting the idea that without a clear indication of the author's intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism." Edit: excerpt
trimbo 13y ago
It is not in terms of the content: "Logging to syslog is available as part of our commercial subscription only." http://nginx.org/en/docs/ngx_core_module.html#error_log http://nginx.org/en/docs/ngx_core_module.html#error_log
- gkoberger 13y ago
  "Satire" doesn't mean "false" or "fake".
user-id 13y ago
Given the content of at least 1 other related site hosted on the same IP (simulantproductions.com), I think it's fair to say this article is satire and should be considered flamebait. http://viewdns.info/reverseip/?host=www.hipyoungstartup.com&t=1 http://viewdns.info/reverseip/?host=www.hipyoungstartup.com&... The three other websites mention the same people so it's fair to say the fourth is just another project of theirs.

oijaf888 13y ago

Given it seems to be a product of http://www.simulantproductions.com/ http://www.simulantproductions.com/ is this just satire or link bait?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

DigitalSea 13y ago

I can't tell if this post is serious or not (the domain name throws me off a little). I use NGINX myself, but I am also aware that Apache is playing catchup quite quickly as well and Apache 5.4 is a decent version of the popular open source server. Use whatever fits your needs, just because it didn't fit your needs doesn't mean you should go forcing your opinion upon others. Many people including myself have had nothing but great experiences using NGINX and I don't actually see any real argument here to stop using NGINX. Based on the tone of the article I get the kind of vibe that the author has the "I liked this band before they became mainstream" mentality about software. NGINX deserves all of the money they can get, they have a great product that is worth paying for and it's quite usuable without paying a cent, so I don't understand what there is to complain about.

davidw 13y ago
Apache httpd is at version 2.4.7: http://httpd.apache.org/ http://httpd.apache.org/
- DigitalSea 13y ago
  I had MySQL on the mind obviously. I meant 2.4, thanks for point it out though!

jacques_chester 13y ago

This blog post demonstrates why the syslog feature is ideal for segmenting Nginx's market. Almost nobody cares about it, except the sort of place doing > tens of millions of requests per day. The sort of place that might have some money and the scale to realise that a few thousand bucks is cheaper than a bunch of engineer time. It's a good case study in smart pricing.

icambron 13y ago
This. From the article: >I don’t blame NGINX for wanting money in exchange for what is admittedly amazing software. I just don’t want any part of it. Why not? You're using this awesome software whose value you appreciate and which is, you admit, open source. It's just not convenient enough for you. So why can't you pony up the money for your huge, high-traffic website?
- jesalas 13y ago
  It's pretty simple actually: We don't have an HTTP server software budget. The expectation is that the tech team will choose the right tools for the job and ask for paid tools when we need them (eg. New Relic). NGINX doesn't differentiate enough from the other HTTP servers out there to justify the cost.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    > NGINX doesn't differentiate enough from the other HTTP servers out there to justify the cost. Then why the angst? This just makes me more confused about what your argument is.
    - makomk 13y ago
      What angst? That post reads more like a warning to others to me - after all, if they'd been aware of this issue from the start, they could've just used Apache from the beginning and avoided the hassle of having to migrate.
    - 13y ago

mythz 13y ago

Sigh, another example of the worst thing about OSS - privileged, self-entitled users thinking the world owes them something.

Mikeb85 13y ago
OSS has nothing to do with it. Some people are just jerks. They're the same people who are problem customers for products they pay for too, and probably the same people cutting you off in traffic and not tipping their waiter when they go out to dinner.
ars_technician 13y ago
They aren't self-entitled if the project has any sense of community and has accepted external contributions of code/documentation/etc. Lots of external hours go into projects like this and moves like these are myopic and generally a big 'screw-you' to active external contributors.
- mythz 13y ago
  External contributors are usually not the problem, since they're intimately familiar with the project and know just how much time and effort the core team invests in it to keep it running. Contributors that have had a positive impact are usually given free commercial licenses, thanking them for their efforts. The 'screw you contributors' is a common argument used by self-entitled users to try and shame core maintainers into continuing to devote all their future efforts, giving away all their future time and IP away for free - just so they can continue their unfettered use of everything they make, and for them to continue to provide support, so that end-user commercial products can continue to benefit from all their future efforts, uncompensated.

cbsmith 13y ago

Really, it isn't too hard to patch the logging in nginx and/or have a named pipe that writes to syslog. My team made a patch to have it log to UDP multicast, and it wasn't too bad. If you're really pissed at the nginx guys, contribute the patch back. Sure, I quibble with their approach to a commercial model, but I really think this is a case of "me thinks she doth protest too much" in both the literal and implied meaning.

donavanm 13y ago
> Really, it isn't too hard to patch the logging in nginx and/or have a named pipe that writes to syslog. Be careful with high performance expectations on named pipes. The fifo is in memory, but the inode is on disk. It really sucks to block on stat() and friends when you dont expect it. Oh! And those FIFOs act as a 64kb buffer. Need more buffering? Put another pipe on it!
- cbsmith 13y ago
  syslog is also a syscall, and has limited buffering. A named pipe can actually potentially amortize overhead more effectively. (And just because an inode is involved does not mean that a call to stat() involves a trip to disk.) If you are really worried about buffering, you can always have a consumer of the named pipe with its own buffering before writing to syslog (yes, that can get ugly). In a perfect world, I'd actually prefer to write to a ring buffer in shared memory (one per worker to avoid too much contention) and then have another process that empties it as fast as it can. Either way, it's actually not that hard to hack in to nginx. If someone were to contribute a patch that did logging the "right" way and host it on say... github, I think you'd find the nginx commercial folks would have a response that works out pretty well for everyone. The catch is, it requires someone to do something.
ars_technician 13y ago
They wouldn't take it because it competes with the enterprise features. Do you see why this model is fundamentally incompatible with open source now?

wereHamster 13y ago

Why not log into a pipe where syslog-ng listens on the other end?

cassianoaquino 13y ago

why not pointing access_log/error_log to fifos and use rsyslog/syslog-ng to read direct from it?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

dknecht 13y ago

CloudFlare generates 50gb/s of logs globally and have handled collecting this volume in two ways. Historically the logs are sent to a local syslog-ng through the use of a PIPE and the forwarded to central logger. This can be done with nginx with no patches by just treating the PIPE as file. Just make sure you do a little buffering inside nginx. access_log /dev/nginx_access log_format_name buffer=64k flush=10s; Since this is a pipe there is still some blocking IO, but no worse off then writing to local file. The way we are migrating will be non-blocking IO through the use of Lua Resty log module ( https://github.com/cloudflare/lua-resty-logger-socket https://github.com/cloudflare/lua-resty-logger-socket ). We will write up a blog post at some point but hopefully this is useful to you. In the future we are going to be going one step further and have NGINX emit protobuff files. Feel free to email dane AT cloudflare.com if you have any questions.

justincormack 13y ago
yes Openresty is the big part of the Nginx ecosystem that is outside the Nginx company and provides a completely different way of adding features.
kevinastone 13y ago
+1 on that eventual blog post.
chrissnell 13y ago
Apologies everyone for the somewhat o/t question here but, what do you guys do with your 50Gb of logs every second? Where do they go after they leave nginx?
- sbierwagen 13y ago
  To the NSA, presumably: http://exiledonline.com/read-yasha-levines-introduction-to-the-crypto-spy-service-cloudflare-isucker-big-brother-internet-culture/ http://exiledonline.com/read-yasha-levines-introduction-to-t...
  - grey-area 13y ago

neya 13y ago

Not relating to the Author's opinion, I would just like to know if there's a legitimate, competent competitor to Nginx apart from Apache? Just curious as I've already had a bad experience with monopolies in the past.

oomkiller 13y ago
http://cherokee-project.com/ http://cherokee-project.com/ and http://www.lighttpd.net/ http://www.lighttpd.net/ are the only other ones I've heard of, and they seem to have their own niche they target. There is also https://github.com/okws/okws https://github.com/okws/okws. I'm sure there are many more, but none of them have sizable market share, especially compared to nginx/apache.
jaytaylor 13y ago
HAProxy[0] has fit the bill for me in many instances. [0] http://haproxy.1wt.eu/ http://haproxy.1wt.eu/
- orthecreedence 13y ago
  Just want to mention that HAProxy isn't a web server like nginx, but a proxy. So while it competes at some things nginx is commonly used for, its not a full competitor (you wouldn't replace nginx+php-fpm w/ HAProxy+php-fpm). That said, if you're looking for a proxy/load balancer, HAProxy is most likely the absolute best you're going to find anywhere, ever...and the price is right ;)
mfjordvald 13y ago
There's a fork of nginx, called tengine, maintained by the people at Alibaba. http://tengine.taobao.org/ http://tengine.taobao.org/ Conveniently this would support the authors requirements of syslog feature.

ajclark 13y ago

I wonder if: A) The author is using a load balancer that can do centralised logging in a sane fashion perhaps they can turn off end logging on nginx all together. B) The author has looked in to the Lua nginx scripting capabilities for direct logging without touching disk. C) Place a greater emphasis on SaaS logging with javascript on the client side. It sounds as if their architecture needs a massive re-think.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

vacri 13y ago

... so write to a named pipe instead of the disk?

Rantenki 13y ago

It's $1350/server per year to pay for the feature. You mention in your post: "Our noble HTTP server". Wait. Not plural? I know that a that is a fair bit of money for a bootstrapped startup, but if you are anticipating enough traffic that the syslog feature is an issue, AND you have at least three floors of offices (as mentioned in your blog post), then maybe your OPEX prioritization is a bit off, and you should just pony up. Nginx is a great piece of software for $no dollars, maybe it would be good karma to pay for the extras you need?

ars_technician 13y ago
Yes, $1350/server per year * 100 VMs which just broker requests from clients to php-fpm. Totally reasonable. /s For that price, they could pay someone who's sole job is to maintain a private fork with the feature. It's not like they can submit it back since nginx would reject an enterprise competing patch, but at least they would have the functionality and the benefit of another dev on hand.
- rhino444 13y ago
  So is that about the pricing or the closed source? Would it be different if the pricing was something else? Just curious. Also, like quite a few people pointed out, why not request "the best pricing" given certain deployment scenario?

jesalas 13y ago

Hi everyone, I certainly didn't expect this strong of a response! I wrote the blog post as more of a slice-of-tech-life brain dump or request for comments/ideas. I certainly won't suggest that everyone should ditch NGINX, but it has possibly run its course for us. As I mentioned, I think that NGINX is an amazing piece of software. It's actually powering the very site where I complained about it. I just can't justify recommending licenses for it at work when we don't do anything with it that Apache httpd couldn't do for free. You guys are right, The Site is poorly designed and suffers from a lot of architectural flaws. That's why I have a job in the first place! It's been a long journey getting to where we are and there's a lot more to do. Thanks to everyone for the opinions and ideas!

mrmincent 13y ago

So these guys have one of the biggest days of their year coming up, seem to be running a large operation, and are only just realising this now. You get what you pay for, and from the sounds of it they haven't paid much.

happywolf 13y ago

Given the magnitude of the traffic, I assume the revenue will be proportional. What to bitch about of paying for something that adds value to one's business?

nso 13y ago

It's never "impossible" to avoid disk writes. I'm assuming it's running on Linux, and in that case you could simply log to a shm mount. Since Linux is file-based, it really doesn't care what medium it stores the file on. Ofc. you'll have to handle a couple of potential pitfalls, like running out of shm, but I think this should be much easier than ditching nginx altogether. Linux was made for hacking, so hack away.

vertis 13y ago

I do find it a little amusing that the author doesn't want to pay and doesn't want to do it himself. FOSS is two sided, this is the perfect opportunity to contribute. FWIW, It's really not that hard to build your own RPM/DEB

pnt 13y ago

Nginx can log to stdout (access_log /dev/stdout) and be piped to a program that reads from stdin and forwards to rsyslog. Technical workarounds aside, the blog author should get approval from his manager/ceo to purchase commercial nginx. I don't see what's unreasonable about a profitable business paying for a useful commercial feature.

danenania 13y ago

Why is this getting upvoted? We should ditch Nginx because they are trying to build a sustainable business on top of their amazing OSS contribution? When quality OSS projects like Nginx turn into profitable businesses, that's very good for OSS as a whole. We should be cheering them and gasp paying them if we need their high end features, not abandoning them.

GhotiFish 13y ago
sensible right up until they start rejecting patches for needed features because they conflict with commercial goals. There's a legitimate conflict of interest here.
- fsniper 13y ago
  No you can always fork. That's a business they have the right to accept or reject patches however they like.
  - makomk 13y ago
    Yeah, and other businesses have the right to conclude that they'd rather use a full-featured open source web server than one that's crippled to create a market for the expensive proprietary version. Of course, some people in this discussion seem to disagree - I've seen a lot of people acting as though it's somehow unfair to nginx for him to point this out to other potential nginx users or to switch to a different server rather thay paying up. It's like people here think the nginx developers have some right to bait people in with the open source version and then charge vast sums for basic features, and that anyone who isn't onboard with this scheme is greedy.
    - Mikeb85 13y ago
      They're giving away high quality software for free, with the source code, and a liberal open source licence. They don't owe anyone shit...

rdtsc 13y ago

Ok, fight fire with fire (inflammatory post with inflammatory response) here it goes: Scumbag Hipster Young Startup -- with a 3 floor building (mentioned CEO coming down all the way from the 3rd floor), aggregating 50M events related to sales every day, taking advantage of hundreds of thousands of volunteered man hours put into the FOSS stack they are using, are throwing a hissy fit about having to pay the creators of the software they are using for an enterprise feature.

ars_technician 13y ago
Is this money going to the external contributors as well? Volunteers that submitted patches, tests, and documentation?
- lsaferite 13y ago
  Arguably you are paying for a license that covers support and the ADDITIONAL functionality. Everyone still has free access to the core code that people contributed towards. If they were to take contributed code and lock it behind a commercial license, THEN you could get all uppity.
  - redblacktree 13y ago
    Others are pointing out that they routinely reject these features in the FOSS offering, citing a conflict with the enterprise edition. That's the worst part of this, imo.
    - lsaferite 13y ago
      I don't disagree, but my point is that the code people freely contributed prior to this change is still freely available to the public. If they are rejecting patches for features that impinge on their enterprise offerings and you have an issue with how the project is run now, you are welcome to not contribute, fork, or use another project.
      - 13y ago

krenoten 13y ago

If you don't want it to hit disk, why don't you just not log to disk? Are you running a unix variant? There are several ways to do this. Why not log to /dev/shm or a pipe, instead of changing nginx? Rsyslog is also probably not the best choice for high volume log aggregation. It performs an rpc per message. That sucks. Use something that batches, like scribe.

kul_ 13y ago
I agree, If you are aggregating logs so small that they can fit into memory, most likely that you do not care where it goes. Otoh if the logs are enormous you must have robust periodic log aggregation jobs like map reduce to do that and it is must to have logs on disk. Moreover 50m/day is ~ 578/sec , which isn't huge for a cluster of servers.

embro 13y ago

It's open source. If your company lives from the web traffic, hire a coder to patch it or just pay for it. There is also other solutions like Cherokee web server and Lighthttpd.

youngtaff 13y ago

As an interesting aside… If someone contributes code for a feature that ends up in the commercial product, are they stuck with the options of paying the annual per license fee, or compiling their own code to get the feature?

voretaq7 13y ago
Basically, yes.

Nodex 13y ago

Cry a larger river? You choose to install VIA RPM. As everyone says "fork it yourself". You're honestly boycotting the great speed and performance of Nginx due to being lazy. In fairness their support staff are a bunch of tossers (one in particular - you know who you are) but it's a great web server period

kolev 13y ago

Nginx Pro is a bit expensive. I haven't looked into their licensing, but usually with paid software, the biggest issue is activating licenses and stuff, which can't work nicely with autoscaling. One example is when wanted to buy the commercial version of s3fs back in the day - it required running some tool on your server and emailing the guy the hardware signature so that he can email you a key for that server. I'm not saying this is the case with Nginx, but in general, the more strict you make your licensing, the less revenue you're gonna collect. FOSS that charges you for extra features is pretty much doomed - nobody wants to use the less capable version and subconsciously or consciously starts looking for alternatives. Charging for support I truly accept - that's the way to go and it keeps the attitude positive.