Nedelcu - Nginx HTTP Server

It is a well-known fact that the market of web servers has a long-established leader: Apache. According to recent surveys, as of October 2009 over 45 percent of the World Wide Web is served by this fifteen years old open source application. However, for the past few months the same reports reveal the rise of a new competitor: Nginx, a lightweight HTTP server originating from Russia pronounced "engine X". There have been many interrogations surrounding the pronounced newborn. Why has the blogosphere become so effervescent about it? What is the reason causing so many server administrators to switch to Nginx since the beginning of year 2009? Is this apparently tiny piece of software mature enough to run my high-traffic website?

To begin with, Nginx is not as young as one might think. Originally started in 2002, the project was first carried out by a standalone developer, Igor Sysoev, for the needs of an extremely high-traffic Russian website, namely Rambler, which received as of September 2008 over 500 million HTTP requests per day. The application is now used to serve some of the most popular websites on the Web such as WordPress, Hulu, SourceForge, and many more. Nginx has proven to be a very efficient, lightweight yet powerful web server. Along the chapters of this book, you will discover the many features of Nginx and progressively understand why so many administrators have decided to place their trust in this new HTTP server, often at the expense of Apache.

There are many aspects in which Nginx is more efficient than its competitors. First and foremost, speed. Making use of asynchronous sockets, Nginx does not spawn as many times as it receives requests. One process per core suffices to handle thousands of connections, allowing for a much lighter CPU load and memory consumption. Secondly, ease of useconfiguration files are much simpler to read and tweak than with other web server solutions such as Apache. A couple of lines are enough to set up a complete virtual host configuration. Last but not least, modularity. Not only is Nginx a completely open source project released under a BSD-like license, but it also comes with a powerful plug-in systemreferred to as "modules". A large variety of modules are included with the original distribution archive, and many third-party ones can be downloaded online. All in all, Nginx combines speed, efficiency, and power, providing you the perfect ingredients for a successful web server; it appears to be the best Apache alternative as of today.

Although Nginx is available for Windows since version 0.7.52, it is common knowledge that Linux distributions are preferred for hosting production sites. During the various processes described in this book, we will thus assume that you are hosting your website on a Linux operating system such as Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Mandriva, or other well-known distributions.