nginx review
Posted in Industry News on October 13th, 2008 by mdwI’ve only been using apache for about 700 years now. So I was a bit anxious about what I would run into when I started playing with some of the newer choices. Of course, an obvious one to try is nginx (pronounced engine-x) It’s very lightweight compared to apache (what isn’t) and is typically setup to just serve static content and proxy all other requests to an application-specific server. Yes I know this can easily be done with apache and many people do.
My impression so far? It’s small, simple and nice. Of course it’s setup to avoid the heavy lifting, but there’s something appealing about being a specialist. That’s the weakness of apache – everyone wants to climb onboard. How many modules are there anyway? mod_music, mod_vote_2008, mod_mod – yes I’ll give passenger a try soon (mod_rails) but there’s really only a few features I use and apache has just gotten more and more of more as the years go by. My nginx config file for two sites is still under 1k. Not only that, but it has so few lines I actually understand them all !
update 10/29: here’s the canonical reference with great comments from topfunky
