nginx

nginx

File:Nginx.gif
Developer(s)	Igor Sysoev
Stable release	0.7.64 / November 16, 2009 (2009-11-16)
Preview release	0.8.31 / December 23, 2009 (2009-12-23)
Repository	github.com/nginx/nginx
Operating system	Unix-like, Windows
Type	Web server, E-mail proxy
License	BSD-like
Website	www.nginx.org

nginx (pronounced as "engine X") is a lightweight, high performance web server/reverse proxy and e-mail (IMAP/POP3) proxy, licensed under a BSD-like license. It runs on UNIX, GNU/Linux, BSD variants, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows.

Users

Originally, nginx was developed to fill the needs of various websites run by Rambler, for which it was serving 500 million requests per day as of September 2008. According to the November 2009 Netcraft survey, nginx is now used on 14,988,610 domains, making it the fourth most popular web server, and the third most popular non in-house.

Basic HTTP features

• Handling of static files, index files and auto-indexing
• Reverse proxy with caching
• Load balancing
• fault tolerance
• SSL support
• FastCGI support, with caching, although it doesn't have CGI support.
• Name- and IP-based virtual servers
• FLV streaming
• MP4 streaming, using the MP4 streaming module
• Web page access authentication
• gzip compression

Mail proxy features

• SMTP, POP3 and IMAP proxy
• STARTTLS support
• SSL support

Performance

As reverse proxy

No data

Load balancer

Wordpress.com has found nginx to be the only software load balancer able to handle 8000 live traffic requests per second.

See also

• Comparison of web servers
• Comparison of lightweight web servers
• Apache HTTP Server

External links

• Official nginx website
  • nginx Wiki
  • nginx Forum
• Older Nginx for Windows builds using Cygwin

Articles

• Linux Journal article on nginx
• Geolocation with Nginx and free IP database for geo_module.
• Nginx "HOW TO" - Fast and Secure Web Server with fully working examples and explanations.
• Open Source SSL Acceleration with Nginx