Martin Fjordvald - Nginx HTTP Server - Fourth Edition: Harness the power of Nginx to make the most of your infrastructure and serve pages faster than ever before

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Acquisition Editor: Shrilekha Inani
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First published: July 2010
Second edition: July 2013
Third edition: November 2015
Fourth edition: February 2018

Production reference: 1120218

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ISBN 978-1-78862-355-1

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Martin Fjordvald is a 29-year-old Danish entrepreneur who started his company straight out of high school. Backed by a popular website, he became a jack of all trades having to deal with the business, programming, and marketing side of his business. The popularity of his website grew and so did the performance requirements of his code and servers.

He got involved with the community project to document Nginx early on and has written several blog posts and wiki articles detailing how Nginx works.

Clement Nedelcu was born in France and studied at UK, French, and Chinese universities. After teaching computer science, programming, and systems administration at several eastern Chinese universities, he worked as a technology consultant in France, specialized in the web and .NET software development as well as Linux server administration. Since 2005, he has also been administering a major network of websites in his spare time, which allowed him to discover Nginx. Clement now works as CTO. for a Hong-Kong-based company developing management software for schools.

Amet Umerov works as a Linux system engineer with promising start-up. InsideDNA, which provides cloud-based genomics and data analytics to the biotechnology sector working on oncology drugs.

Amet develops computing platforms for reproducible research in bioinformatics.

Specifically, he builds and supports highly parallel, scalable, and stable computing environments for compute-intense analytics. He uses Nginx as the frontend for web applications and load balancers for Docker environments.

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It is a well-known fact that the web server market has a long-established leader: Apache. According to recent surveys, as of October 2015, almost 35 percent of the World Wide Web is served by this 20-year-old open source application. However, for the past few years, the same reports reveal the rise of a new competitor: Nginx, a lightweight HTTP server originating from Russiapronounced engine X. There have been many questions surrounding this young web server. What is the reason causing so many server administrators to switch to Nginx since the beginning of year 2009? Is this 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 Reddit, Wikipedia, WordPress, Dropbox, and many more. Nginx has proven to be a very efficient, lightweight yet powerful web server. Throughout this book, you will discover 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 processes as many times as it receives requests. One process per core suffices to handle thousands of connections, allowing a much lighter CPU load and memory consumption. Second, ease of use: configuration 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.