Nginx, the little Russian web server taking on the giants

http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/23/nginx-the-little-russian-web-server-taking-on-the-giants/

by yannis • 16 years ago

318 109 16 years ago

royal.pingdom.com

patio112• 16 years ago

Nginx runs all my Rails sites and will forever. If you haven't tried it yet, I can't say enough good things about it. It never breaks. It has just absurdly good memory consumption, which is clutch when you're trying to run your site on a memory heavy platform like Rails on a VPS which is very memory constrained.

(By comparison, Apache is quite the memory hog and I still haven't figured out how to say the magic words to get it to not effectively crash my blog and every other site on the server if I burst to 10,000 visitors in an hour. That is not supposed to be a big number. Apache has 500 MB to play with and still can't keep up.)

I also find, and this might just be a matter of taste, that the configuration makes more sense to me than Apache configuration does. This is funny because Apache configuration is obsessively well-documented and Nginx configuration is not.

Additionally, some easy-to-use features cover weak points in typical Rails (&etc) deployment scenarios. The big one for me is file serving, since my website is essentially one big PDF printing press. The simplest level (works for me, won't work for Facebook) is just having the file anywhere accessible on the disk and having the application put a special header on the response saying "Hey, Nginx: give them this path.", then terminating Rails' involvement. That frees up your Mongrel to start doing hard work again and greatly, greatly, GREATLY decreases the resources you need to stream your 5 MB PDF, 20 MB executable, etc to the user.

So it scales down, but does it scale up? Ooooooooh yeah. Impressively so. See the tales of Wordpress deployment, where not a whole lot of Nginx gets hit with a year's worth of my traffic every couple of seconds and still keeps on trucking.

callmeed• 16 years ago

So, is your preferred config still nginx + mongrels? Have you experimented with nginx + passenger or nginx + unicorn?

patio112• 16 years ago

I experimented with Nginx + passenger and had little success in the time I had budgeted that weekend (almost certainly due to my own failings). That is my max geekout budget. After that I have to have a reason to rip out stuff and I've got no compelling reason to rip out Mongrel (nota bene: I typically deploy only one or two Rails applications per VPS, with the expectation that they'll essentially monopolize resource usage. If my deployments resembled that of a shared host who could have ~600 forgotten Build A Blog In 15 Minutes apps sitting around waiting for someone to access them again, I'd have figured out Passenger by now or paid someone to figure it out for me.)

cheald2• 16 years ago

I use nginx+passenger and love the heck out of it. Trivial to set up, blazing fast, rock solid, and easy to administrate. I've switched away from Apache for everything except my dev server, and haven't looked back.

steve19• 16 years ago

this sums up my experience with nginx. I have fallen in love with it :)

dmillar2• 16 years ago

I'm wondering how often you have to restart your Mongrel processes? Seems Mongrel loves to bloat.

silvestrov2• 16 years ago

You can upgrade the nginx binary while in flight. I've put the last 2 upgrades online in that manner. See http://pastebin.com/32UX6UQ2 for howto.

FooBarWidget2• 16 years ago

I thought Apache can also reload the configuration without dropping connections via graceful restarts?

jfarmer• 16 years ago

nginx + passenger + REE for Ruby web apps is awesome. It's all I use these days.

tcc619• 16 years ago

+1 for nginx/passenger/REE combo. Same stack I've been running all my ruby apps on.

steveklabnik3• 16 years ago

It is awesome. I was using that until very recently, when I switched to Unicorn over passenger.

kitcar2• 16 years ago

+1 for NGINX + PHP-FPM + XCache + MySQL as a replacement for the LAMP stack - significantly decreased my web server's utilization of both CPU and Memory...

paraschopra2• 16 years ago

Can you detail this configuration? How easy/hard is it to setup this stack and then later maintain it? Plus, how much improvement did you actually get will be an interesting piece of info.

chrischen2• 16 years ago

It's gotten a lot easier recently. I believe I installed PHP-FPM through aptitude, and nginx comes from that too. Compiling a newer version yourself isn't that hard. However maybe 2 months ago I couldn't say the same.

EDIT: I had to add dotdeb repo for php-fpm.

kitcar2• 16 years ago

on the maintenance side - I find NGINX conf files to be substantially easier to work with than Apache's - check out the demo conf at the end of this article for example: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10108 .

And setup was pretty easy, as most components are available from the package manner of your choice - http://www.newmediaist.com/n/installing-nginx-mysql-php-fpm-...

codexon2• 16 years ago

I highly recommend Nginx. Not only does it use less resources than Apache, it is actually easier to use than Apache and Lighttpd. I found the configuration file format to be very easy to learn.

The only feature I miss from Apache is being able to use .htaccess.

nreece• 16 years ago

nginx does support rewrite functionality with NginxHttpRewriteModule - http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpRewriteModule

You can also setup nginx for Basic Authentication with NginxHttpAuthBasicModule - http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpAuthBasicModule

leej• 16 years ago

afaik there is not htaccess support in nginx, is there?

andrewvc• 16 years ago

I generally don't miss .htaccess

.htaccess made sense in the world of spaghetti code CGI/PHP scripts running on shared servers, in the world of app frameworks like Rails and Django that stuff (redirection, authentication, etc.) is better handled in the application.

The only cases .htaccess is useful in modern app development is for requests for static assets you don't want routed through the app (images, javascript, etc). Say you want to change MIME types of perhaps the content-disposition. But even in those cases, usually that should be documented as something to enable in the global server config, for two reasons: 1.) .htaccess needs to be checked each request for changes, slowing down your server 2.) you can't just assume .htaccess works, so the administrator needs to be aware of whats going on, in which case they may as well just put it in the global config. Unless your own a shared host like Dreamhost, in which case, yes, .htaccess is very useful.

oomkiller• 16 years ago

I've been using nginx for a long time now, and it's been great. Currently, I host my rails app combining nginx and unicorn with bluepill to manage the processes. I just don't trust passenger. Another specialty is that I use UNIX sockets instead of tcp ports for the reverse proxy, something unique to nginx/unicorn I think.

chadr2• 16 years ago

Why don't you trust Passenger? I'm severing about 6 million page views/day with it and it has been extremely reliable and easy to work with.

teej• 16 years ago

The most compelling use case I've seen where Passenger loses to Unicorn is rolling restarts. The biggest trust issue that I've seen is that of source editability - Unicorn and Mongrel are easier to debug and patch, while Passenger requires a commanding knowledge of Apache to fix.

FooBarWidget2• 16 years ago

Phusion Passenger uses Unix sockets to communicate with backend processes since version 1.0.

atambo2• 16 years ago

I love nginx, but one thing that I wish nginx could do is be able to enable/disable modules without having to recompile. It's annoying having to recompile nginx whenever a new version of passenger is released.

codexon2• 16 years ago

I agree with you there. Nginx should make it easier to automate this by having a link to the latest version like nginx.org/download/latest.tgz

Fortunately, nginx allows you to upgrade to a new binary on the fly.

http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxCommandLine#Upgrading_To_a_New_Bi...

burke• 16 years ago

Here's the script I've been using to install the latest version. It was kind of quickly hacked together, and the symlink stuff near the end breaks occasionally, so if anyone's going to use this, you might want to read it over first.

http://gist.github.com/313430

devicenull• 16 years ago

It's annoying, but I'd imagine there would be a performance penalty for having dynamically loadable modules. I'd rather keep the performance, and just have to recompile.

cheald2• 16 years ago

I suspect that a lot of that is performance-oriented. By compiling modules into the binary, I suspect you can get far superior performance out of it than you could with hot-loaded modules.

Daniel_Newby• 16 years ago

Calling dynamically loaded libraries is very fast, no more than a few nanoseconds per message that passes between the server and a module. It is no worse than the dynamically-linked C standard library we use so heavily.

Development effort is probably the real reason. It takes a fair amount of planning to design a table-driven module loader and indirection layer. Indirection with raw pointers costs brain power. (And do not even think about the reference counting hell of a dynamically unloadable module.)

Edit: And think about what happens when you upgrade a Django or Rails plug-in: it generally gets recompiled and what amounts to relinked. The difference is that the language system itself hides the work, while nginx uses explicit build tools.

epochwolf• 16 years ago

Given that you can hot-swap the binary you could just write a bash script to enable or disable the modules you want and swap out the binary when it finishes compiling your changes.

joshu• 16 years ago

Anyone written a plugin for nginx? I want to write a nginx -> redis connector for a project but haven't dug into the documentation.

atambo2• 16 years ago

Emiller's Guide to Nginx Module Development: http://emiller.info/nginx-modules-guide.html

Emiller's Advanced Topics In Nginx Module Development: http://www.evanmiller.org/nginx-modules-guide-advanced.html

staunch• 16 years ago

First thing I'd check out is the memcached module http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpMemcachedModule

ezmobius3• 16 years ago

There already exists an nginx module that talks to redis, it just does basic gets and doesn't support the entire redis protocol but it's a Start. Sorry don't have a link handy and I'm on my iPhone, a kittle google juice will find it for you.

rmanocha• 16 years ago

Never used it, but there seems to be a module for doing so - http://wiki.nginx.org/Nginx3rdPartyModules#HTTP_Redis_Module

ntoshev• 16 years ago

Would be a cool way to get Redis asynchronously serving requests for Tornado.

tyler• 16 years ago

Evan Miller's guide (already linked above) is great. But be prepared to dig into the Nginx code. Most things aren't documented, however, at least in my opinion, it has some of the cleanest large scale C code around. So, don't be scared to dig in.

yannis• 16 years ago

    Pingdom: Where do you think nginx will be in 5 years?

    Sysoev: I really have no idea.

Although this statement sounded negative at first, it is actually brilliant. Rather than defining a cast-in-stone development plan, focus on what the market is going to be asking from you as you go along and code it.

plaes• 16 years ago

Well, nginx started because Apache devs didn't want to address the issue that arised when lots of users with slow connections were accessing the site. Anyone else remember the Slowloris HTTP DoS - ngingx is basically immune to it...

As Sysoev was working for one of the Russia's biggest portals that apache couldn't handle very well.. So he wrote a server that did one thing very well - waits until client submits their request and then serves this request as fast as possible. And he did it well :)

Slowloris HTTP DoS - http://ha.ckers.org/slowloris/

seldo• 16 years ago

Crazy Russian hackers: is there nothing they can't do?

giardini• 16 years ago

Yes: publish software that does not include a trojan horse.

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

given enough time, you can do just about anything, and I suspect that is what's happening.

(this is especially true of software, where you don't need money- only time)

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

by the way, I just realized this could be interpreted wrong- I don't mean to disparage crazy russian hackers. It just seems like a feasible explanation for the number and magnitude of cool or impressive things I've seen come out of russia.

Ya know, Occam's razor and all.

ahi• 16 years ago

Has anyone used nginx with cherrypy?

SyK3• 16 years ago

This is my exact approach for dozens of tiny internal / "glue layer" HTTP servers, all over the place, for a long time now.

It's brilliant. Almost effort-free and insanely fast, in most cases.

It offers a really cool path too, in nginx + Py -> nginx + Py/C -> nginx + C plugin, to grow from a quick throw-together prototype to something that will take as much load as you can make up with silly benchmarking tools, while development takes a sensible route.

Edit: As a cool more concrete example, I used this trick to build a very quick 'hardware access layer' for an embedded device when it was insisted that Flash be used for the UI. It was 99% Python but with nginx to serve static files and proxy the rest to Flash, and CherryPy as an access layer to a local SQLite DB for data, with Python C calls to proprietary hardware drivers for the device.

Sounds sloppy perhaps but for what it had to do and how well it runs it was incredibly quick and painless to put together.

jamwt3• 16 years ago

Oh yes, lots--works fantastically well.

http://shoptalkapp.com is nginx -> haproxy -> (cherrypy/diesel)

z8000• 16 years ago

I'm curious why haproxy is in the mix. There's a couple of better balancers for nginx if that's why.

SyK3• 16 years ago

Why haproxy? I've always seen it as more of an incoming traffic choice, and actually use it in front of nginx clusters in some cases, this seems confusing.

jamwt3• 16 years ago

HAProxy supports sophisticated balancing schemes, rule-based backend selection, etc.

I.e., if Host header is X, and Ip is Y, but no cookie was provided, then use pool... with this balancing scheme.

nginx's proxy setup out of the box is useful, but I wouldn't consider it on par with things like ZXTM or a Big IP when it comes to robust balancing/fallback patterns and flexible routing rules.

If there's a module that provides all that, I'm happy to hear about it--I haven't found it yet.

rlpb2• 16 years ago

I'm using this combination for the (low traffic) dynamic parts of my site. It seems to work fine.

jbyers• 16 years ago

I've been touting nginx to anyone who will listen here and elsewhere for 2+ years. It just never breaks. Billions and billions of requests, no problem. Spikes up to 500 Mbps, no problem. DOS attacks, misconfigurations, exotic in-a-pinch config changes (think: had to throw in a quick 100K URL map via the hash system), no problem. And the relatively small servers we run it on just putt away nearly idle. It's just too good.

drawkbox2• 16 years ago

Coming up next are backend interactions and cache improvements, refactoring of the rewrite module, and probably new embedded languages: Javascript or Lua.

I really hope he includes lua and javascript. Both would be cutting edge (Javascript server side is still pretty new) and Lua which should be used more. Kepler Project (http://www.keplerproject.org/) is pretty good but Lua gets no love, this could change things big time for Lua.

aschobel• 16 years ago

Lua support inside of Lighttpd via mod_magnet is quite powerful for rewrites. Curious if there is a nginx equivalent.

simonw• 16 years ago

I wouldn't call server-side JavaScript "new" as such - Netscape were experimenting with it in 1996: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server-side_JavaScript

drawkbox2• 16 years ago

True, but in terms of people using it in production and some of the faster JS engines like V8, Tamarin, Spidermonkey, Rhino etc it is having a resurgence now that it is getting to fast enough.

piranha• 16 years ago

here is small rant about v8 in nginx by Igor: http://sysoev.ru/prog/v8.html

It's in russian unfortunately... Probably google translate will help? In short - article says that V8 is not ready to be embedded in servers because of certain shortcomings.

timtadh• 16 years ago

The author Nginx, Igor Sysoev, mentioned lighttpd as the nearest competitor to Nginx. I don't really keep up with webservers, what is the story behind lighttpd stagnating vs Nginx growing in usage?

SyK3• 16 years ago

I don't know about anyone else but I used to use lighty and followed the path I think most people would: Learning Apache, as it's a default, then using something faster to serve static files and proxy to Apache for content (Lighty, briefly), then experimenting with proxying directly to code with things like scgi, etc.

I was at this point, playing with Lighty as an alternative, when nginx first starting poking its head about.

After trying one installation of it, it was so much quicker and smoother that I basically instantly ditched any ideas of bothering with much else. Then you start running sites with any real traffic, where it's more stable than anything I've ever seen, with no real effort and it makes the amount of bs that goes into lighty look ridiculous.

So I guess "the story" is it targets the same niche, and it's better. Bonus being that the deeper you go or the heavier into that niche you are, the wider the margin is.

rlpb2• 16 years ago

lighttpd had a memory leak that was around unfixed for a very long time. Googling couldn't tell me whether it was now fixed or not, but there are many references to it (take a look!). It did strike me as a problem that an essential bug like that wasn't looked at quickly, even if it was a little difficult to pin down.

Perhaps this is a bit unfair, but this is what led me to move over to nginx from lighttpd.

eli• 16 years ago

I've been using lighttpd for static files for a few years and never had any problems. It's faster and less resource intensive than Apache, and it's literally never crashed.

mhartl2• 16 years ago

Nginx got mentioned in printed books, mostly Ruby on Rails related.

I'm proud to say I contributed to this. From RailsSpace (2007), p. 506:

  Nowadays, it seems that many of the cool kids have switched
  to a webserver called Nginx, used on its own or as a proxy
  server. Since much of its documentation is in Russian,
  Nginx (pronounced "engine X") is relatively obscure, but
  we've heard great things about it, and it's currently being
  used by several prominent Rails hosting companies.

Everything in the quote is still true---except for the "obscure" part. :-)

stanley2• 16 years ago

I would disagree. Much of the documentation has been translated to English, with miscellaneous bits of information also available through sites such as StackOverflow and ServerFault.

That said, compliments on spotting a solid piece of software from a mile away.

mhartl2• 16 years ago

Oops, you're right, two things have changed. There is a lot of English documentation now, too. My bad.

ezmobius3• 16 years ago

We've been using nginx at engine yard for 4 years now and I can say that it is the most solid peice of software out of the hundreds of open source componenets we run. We have close to 15k nginx dEmons running if not more last I counted and it accounts for 0.001% of production issues/problems.

Can't say enough good things about this peice of software. It just works and it's smoking fast and very resource friendly. Thumbs up all around

dmillar2• 16 years ago

Ezra, you deserve a lot of the credit for the growth of Nginx. Your evangelism has done nothing short of catapulting its exposure in the community. So, thank you.

ezmobius3• 16 years ago

Thank you, I just looked back in time and it seems I started playing with nginx in 2006. Here was my first blog post whee I figured out how to run rails with it.

http://brainspl.at/articles/2006/08/23/nginx-my-new-favorite...

that config file lives in infamy on many thousands of vps's across the land ;)

kvogt2• 16 years ago

Nginx is incredible. It's my second favorite piece of software (haproxy wins by a hair). At justin.tv we serve tens of billions of requests per month using nginx, and it uses so few system resources that we can run our CPU-heavy caching engine on the same servers.

Take a look at the source sometime. It's kind of fun to see an HTTP parser written like, "if (ngx_str3_cmp(m, 'G', 'E', 'T', ' ')) { r->method = NGX_HTTP_GET;"

whyleyc• 16 years ago

Good to hear you would recommend Nginx. Would you mind expanding on how you use Nginx and haproxy together ? Do you front haproxy with Nginx or vice-versa ?

kvogt2• 16 years ago

nginx front end -> haproxy -> caching engine -> haproxy -> app instances (multiply this stack N times)

haproxy's HTTP feature set is comparatively limited and we simply have too much traffic to put one machine in front of a bunch of web servers.

jwecker• 16 years ago

I've absolutely loved patching and working on modules for nginx source code. Partially I suspect because it's so homogeneous. It's nice and modular and succinct - the optimizations don't obfuscate the code. As others have pointed out, responding to http requests is not rocket science, and digging into nginx reminds you that responding to a simple problem simply tends to yield pretty good reliability and performance.

teye• 16 years ago

Just switched from lighttpd a couple weeks ago. I've been convinced for a while now, but it's still nice to come here and see glowing reviews from Engine Yard and justin.tv.

Wrote a bit about my recreational CentOS install: http://todd.is/nginx-php-and-wordpress-migrating-from-lightt...

Slashed• 16 years ago

Coming up next are [...] probably new embedded languages: Javascript or Lua.

This is interesting. On Sysoev's personal website, there is an article "Why Google V8 is not suitable for embedding into a server yet"(Russian) http://sysoev.ru/prog/v8.html

Basically, he's saying that V8 was developed with Google Chrome in mind, so it's not an easy task to embed it with any other software. The main point is, V8 can't handle memory allocation errors - it just crashes the process, which is suitable for Google Chrome but not for a server.

axod• 16 years ago

I feel like the other point here is that writing a webserver isn't rocket science. If a webserver is very important to you, and nothing freely available really fits your use case well, just write your own.

rmk• 16 years ago

Hmm... if you are good at epoll/kqueue etc and know about the various I/O models supported by Linux.

I think it takes time to gain that expertise.

mhansen• 16 years ago

If you don't have the time for that, try node.js - it handles all the epoll/kqueue for you, letting you program in high-level asynchronous javascript.

alecco• 16 years ago

I beg to differ. A real-life scalable and modular I/O engine server is very tricky just to design.

nginx's code is amazing, even being barely undocumented.

regularfry2• 16 years ago

The performance can't be argued with, but I find the config file format quite limiting compared to lighttpd's.

njharman• 16 years ago

Really? I left lighttpd in disgust over it's nonsensical config files esp how they didn't work the way the docs claimed they did. After dicking with lighttpd to proxy the way I wanted for 1/2 a day I got nginx installed and configured in less than an hour.

nginx config files are logical

regularfry2• 16 years ago

Logical, but restrictive. I still prefer nginx as software, but lighty's config syntax doesn't tie you up in quite so many knots if you're trying to do things out of the ordinary.

wesley• 16 years ago

I wish something like webmin/virtualmin worked with nginx, I bet it would do wonders for it's uptake..

SwellJoe• 16 years ago

We're working on it.

sandGorgon• 16 years ago

Also check out Cherokee - http://www.cherokee-project.com/ - has a lot of similar features as nginx (small and fast), but also has a saner development model, public SCM, a bug tracker (!!!) and a friendlier dev team.

Among the most famous sites using Cherokee are the (recently hyped) chatroulette.com and Lawrence Lessig's web properties.

sunkencity• 16 years ago

I find that cherokee and lighttpd is a pain in the butt when it comes to getting ssl working, all kinds of weird problems. It's dead easy with apache. How's nginx and ssl?

steveklabnik3• 16 years ago

Pretty easy. Set up a block to accept connections on port 443, put 3 or four lines in the config pointing to your certificate, you're done.

jokull• 16 years ago

Anyone using proxy_cache?

epi0Bauqu• 16 years ago

Duck Duck Go uses nginx. I evaluated all the alternatives pretty heavily, and it was the clear winner at the time (2 years ago). I currently use the memached plugin, which is great. I've also used its embedded Perl feature (though not currently).

Speaking of good Web servers, I've heard good things about Yaws lately. Anyone have any real world experience with it? This is the only seemingly solid comparison I've fond: http://www.planeterlang.org/en/planet/article/Nginx_vs_Yaws_...

blhack• 16 years ago

Are you the duckduckgo founder?

I just wanted to say that I absolutely love your search engine. Really really good job on that.

leftnode2• 16 years ago

How well does nginx work with Java stuff? I'm setting up a new server, and want to run Jira and Confluence from port 80 (issues.site.com, wiki.site.com) and Atlassian has an article for getting this to work on Apache, but not nginx.

Does nginx work with any Java stuff?

stuff4ben• 16 years ago

Yes, it does work with Java appservers. See http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxJavaServers

leftnode2• 16 years ago

Great, thank you for that. I think I know what I'll be playing around with tonight.

warfangle• 16 years ago

Foursquare runs nginx in front of Lift[1]. Not sure if they're using Jetty or some other servlet container, though.

[1] http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dcbpz3ck_24f3v83ggz (slide 16)

harryh• 16 years ago

We use Jetty (if anyone happens to care).

-harryh

thinkbohemian• 16 years ago

I love Nginx. Though judging by the comments here, i'm not alone.

Nginx + Passenger + REE

FTW

trevorturk2• 16 years ago

I've written two "getting started with passenger + nginx" articles. One is for Ubuntu, one is for Mac OS X:

http://almosteffortless.com/2009/10/22/installing-varnish-wi...

http://almosteffortless.com/2009/09/16/passenger-with-nginx-...

Nginx, the little Russian web server taking on the giants

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