Nginx Overtakes Microsoft As No. 2 Web Server 340
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samzenpus
from the up-and-coming dept.
from the up-and-coming dept.
tsamsoniw writes "With financial backing from the likes of Michael Dell and other venture capitalists, open source upstart Nginx has edged out Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server) to hold the title of second-most widely used Web server among all active websites. What's more, according to Netcraft's January 2012 Web Server Survey, Nginx over the past month has gained market share among all websites, whereas competitors Apache, Microsoft, and Google each lost share."
market share v. reality (Score:5, Interesting)
Google Icon (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is the Google icon on the post when its MS that got overtaken. Is Nginx run by Google?
Re:Quality (Score:4, Interesting)
Time for some legitimate competition for Apache, it's been a long time. A bit of competition, which they haven't had much of could help them too. I am curious if it is easier to configure than Apache, and how well does it integrate with a JEE containers for serving the static content?
But what a fucking name though. :) I found out it's supposed to be pronounced engine-x. Until I found out I called it enjinx. Reminds me of that movie 'That Thing You Do' where the band called themselves the Oneders at the beginning and everyone called them the 'oh-nigh-ders' or 'oh-need-ders'. Then they got a manager and he forced them to change it to the Wonders because it didn't look garbled. So I say, why not just call it EngineX. It still sounds cool and doesn't have that annoying 'I'm trying to look cool' thing going at the same time. Regardless, sounds like a good product.
The only thing that makes me dubious is that they're based in Russia, I hope Putin and his boys don't have a back door into it. But America is starting to look no better than Russia these days in terms of a government that actually cares about the people. Have you checked out the NDAA that Obama signed this week? It lets the American military arrest civilians inside America (heck Fox news AND democrat supporters are all screaming bloody murder about this one). So on second thought I think I'll give this jinx thing a try.
Re:Wow, never even heard of that one (Score:5, Interesting)
I was also going to speculate/wonder if it was one of those "rigged" deals, like a few years back when IIS was declared as "overtaking firefox" and becoming #1 because "most web sites on the web used it". The actual reason was that GoDaddy (which hosts a vast majority of "parked" domains) was paid-off (or "otherwise incented" by Microsoft to switch to IIS. So when you considered a "www." to be a "unique site", and 99% of "unique sites" to be garbage parked-domains, IIS was not the leader.
So, I wonder if some other bizarre statistical work is at-play. For example, does someone like Akamai, who hosts a lot of other people's sites, use Nginx to skew these numbers??
Re:Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Hell yes, it's easier to configure than Apache. Has most of the plugins you could want from Apache, whilst being much more lightweight.
2) I'll echo the other comment here, YOU HAVE THE SOURCE CODE. Worry about backdoors in IIS from the U.S. Gov't., nginx has way more eyes on it.
3) You eventually figured out the pronunciation. Most of the people I know that use GNU/Linux and LaTeX ca't pronounce GNU or LaTeX, but they work great so they get used. What's the problem?
...and efficiency (Score:5, Interesting)
I have been using it for two years, serving several professional sites, and the transition from the initial Apache setup was surprisingly smooth.
What I like in particular, compared to Apache
- fantastic performance gain, in terms of cpu and memory
- maintenance gain: the configuration appears (at least to me) to be more "developer like", and easier to configure/extend with many options
- load balancing is
The only drawback I (initially) found was the lack of a PHP embedded/module. But using php-fpm happened to be a good alternative, via a local port.
Re:Wow, never even heard of that one (Score:5, Interesting)
no, this is genuine. it has been steadily gaining popularity over the past several years.
nginx is being developed by a russian guy who up until recently was working (as a sysadmin, apparently) for one of the major russian web portals where nginx originated as an in-house project first but was open-sourced. the guy has now left the company (which has been slowly dying anyway) and incorporated an llc or something, focused on nginx. it was already quite popular in russia 5-6 years ago (when i was still living there).
nginx is an efficient event-driven front-end server, quite often used for loadbalancing in front of traditional apache or tomcat or whatever other backends, but in a simple case of a LAMP server it can be hooked up directly to PHP via FPM or FCGI.
config syntax is quite expressive, with quite advanced uri / header - based rewriting capabilities. there is even a built-in Perl interpreter for more advanced use (which tends to be abused by people who forget what being an event-driven server means by sticking logic in there... oh well, people use things like node.js too *shudder*).
Re:Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
I am quite surprised. nginx may be a good product, but it's also lacking a lot of functionality that a web server used as a load balancer or cache should support. For example, it doesn't support HTTP 1.1 to the backend, thus it can't do name based virtual hosts on the servers it caches.
I *WANTED* to use nginx for a large multi-tennant website we were building, but it didn't support it.
IIS will become legacy software (Score:5, Interesting)
Nonsense. IIS will become a legacy product [in-other-news.com]
The share in Japan, Germany, Russia and many other countries already lies below 4% for many years. But also traditionally Microsoft-friendly countries can turn away from IIS, for example in the last 10 years, the share in France fell from 35% to 5%, in Brazil and Taiwan from over 45% to 15% and in India even from 65% to 18%.
IIS will probably be able to hold out another 10 years, but in the long term it's future is far from rosy.
Re:IIS will become legacy software (Score:5, Interesting)
IIS loses everywhere, also in the "top 1 million" - category on Netcraft.
I guess the one million websites with the most traffic are not "farting around", right?
Re:Quality (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually did the test, passed all my local config from apache to nginx, the config approach is quite different, it took me like 3 day of getting it 30-60 minutes to config ngix all the things that apache had working but the final config was about 20 lines long, oppossed to a much bigger apache config that has taken year to "master".
Needlss to say, been happy using nginx for a couple of months now on local testing env., still neeed to port production sites :)