Nginx has replaced Apache as the most used web server among the top 10,000 sites

http://w3techs.com/technologies/cross/web_server/ranking

by MarionG • 12 years ago

274 75 12 years ago

dtech• 12 years ago

Couldn't these results be skewed because Nginx is often used as a reverse proxy?

If there is Apache or something custom behind Nginx it will show up as Nginx I guess. I do not see this issue adressed and it might cause significant skew if you look at the top websites (since they will more often deploy these kinds of tricks)

yuchi• 12 years ago

Nginx is used as a reverse proxy for less strong application servers. IMHO (and experience) doing it for Apache would be pretty useless.

byroot• 12 years ago

Depends. I remember having an issue with an apache/mod_php app that was using way too much memory.

The app was doing polling every 10 seconds and apache had a 15 seconds keep alive. So each user of the app was maintaining an apache process alive.

Disabling the keep-alive was not acceptable, so I just threw nginx in front to do the keep-alive, memory usage was immediately reduced by ~75%.

If I knew apache better I might have been able to do it with just apache, but nginx is so simple to use...

jamescun• 12 years ago

Depends heavily on how you have configured Apache. If you are using something like PHP and the forking model (most common MPM configuration), you can only handle as many requests as you have workers; additionally you are spinning up a full PHP interpreter when serving static assets. In my experience[1], putting Nginx in front of Apache to serve static assets and leaving Apache as a sort of application server is one of the lowest hanging fruit in scaling a LAMP application.

[1] Was Co-Founder/CTO of a medium-sized PHP PaaS company

nkozyra• 12 years ago

At absolute bare minimum it allows for error mitigation for the underlying server application.

In other words, your site doesn't necessarily have to be down even if Apache is down (assuming you're for some reason bound to Apache).

toni• 12 years ago

Isn't it considered best practice to serve your static files through Nginx itself and only reverse proxy requests for dynamic endpoints? And if that's the case, Shouldn't Nginx be counted as a full web server?

riquito• 12 years ago

You can configure Nginx to cache and serve html or as a load balancer. In these cases it isn't the "real" web server, and it's common.

thesnufkin2• 12 years ago

Good point, or perhaps more used as the LB? We prefer Varnish as the reverse proxy, but we are using nginx as load balancer, which still shows up as the server in the response header, even though we exclusively run apache on the back-ends to serve the PHP application. I am not sure how typical this setup is though.

harshreality• 12 years ago

Unfortunately too typical. You're keeping all the performance issues with a LA<database>P stack (high resource-use variance going from low to high traffic), and merely adding layers in front. Unless you need an apachehttpd-specific feature, you should look into moving to a nginx + php-fpm setup.

JimmaDaRustla• 12 years ago

You reverse because you can't have two apps on the same port, obviously...but the real reason is because apache's lack of features...and apache is bad!

Even if apache is running in the background to serve up things like php, its most likely because there is some config that hasn't been converted to run the site on something like fast-cgi or FPM.

I wonder how something like haproxy appears when nginx is behind it.

bigdubs• 12 years ago

We use nginx as a load balancer on its own machine and distribute requests to a small farm of machines running windows/iis.

Nginx is great as a load balancer, not quite as sophisticated as HAProxy but the SSL support is good and it gets the job done pretty well.

I'm sure we're not the only ones.

bowlofpetunias• 12 years ago

Exactly. I have much more Apache servers than Nginx, but you can't see most of those Apache instances from the outside.

gjvc• 12 years ago

i note postfix usurped sendmail much faster.

nailer2• 12 years ago

sendmail was genuinely terrible: monolithic, unused, uninstallable attack vectors everywhere (echoes of openssl), near-binary configuration which required learning a complex macro language. Even Sendmail X bears more resemblance to Postfix than it does to Sendmail 9.

nailer2• 12 years ago

Replying to myself: s/uninstallable/unremovable/. Though everyone seems to have got what I meant.

VMG• 12 years ago

funnily enough nginx also is a IMAP/POP3 proxy server

jeltz• 12 years ago

It is also a SMTP proxy, so you can put nginx in front of your postfix servers.

dreen• 12 years ago

can someone link up a good "nginx for newbies" type resource for someone who is familiar with programming?

techsupporter• 12 years ago

http://nginx.org/en/docs/beginners_guide.html

Spittie• 12 years ago

After reading the beginner's guide (which is pretty good and cover most of the simple stuff), I suggest reading http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls and http://wiki.nginx.org/IfIsEvil to see some "best practices" (which usually aren't followed in many tutorials out there, even on nginx's own wiki).

corford• 12 years ago

Here's a good starting point for getting your config right:

https://github.com/h5bp/server-configs-nginx

mfjordvald2• 12 years ago

I hope it's kosher that I link my own blog since it deals specifically with nginx: http://blog.martinfjordvald.com/2010/07/nginx-primer/

vegardx3• 12 years ago

This is one of the best primers you get for getting started with Nginx, and mfjordvald is a genuinely nice and helpful guy!

saltcod2• 12 years ago

Any opinions on Nginx being more difficult to setup/run than Apache? I'm considering switching, but I really have enough overhead to deal with!

Theodores2• 12 years ago

Just give it a go. Remember you can set it up to run on another port, e.g. 81, 8080 etc. so you can get it working whilst still having Apache up and running on your site.

For popular CMS applications you can normally find some helpful .conf file to get you started.

You will also need to setup php-fpm if you are running a PHP flavoured 'LAMP' stack.

marceldegraaf• 12 years ago

I find nginx way easier to set up than Apache, at least for "standard" (PHP, Ruby/Rails, static) applications and sites. The config file syntax is cleaner than Apache's, and setup is easy (through your favourite package manager). The memory footprint of nginx is also smaller than that of Apache (at least with default settings).

saltcod2• 12 years ago

Cool! I never thought of that!

Will it be noticeably faster than my current (tuned) Apache setup?

mfjordvald2• 12 years ago

I'm very biased on this subject but I find the configuration file to be far more simple. The lack of .htaccess support is also a blessing in disguise as everything is in explicitly defined locations.

mercer2• 12 years ago

If you have anything to do with Drupal (and possibly Wordpress) as well, you might run into issues.

At least concerning Drupal, a lot of plugins require changes to the .htaccess file(s), and at least when I tried, this was hard to translate to nginx.

But there are some .htaccess to nginx converters, so I'm not sure if that is a big issue at this time.

And as others have said, you might find the nginx approach to be much more comfortable than .htaccess. I did.

vegardx3• 12 years ago

Drupal works flawlessly with Nginx[1], and there is little magic involved. You even have good handling of private files, permission and such.

There's only a few modules that require changes to the default ".htaccess" (basically just overriding Apache default logic) of Drupal, like the module Boost. But since Nginx can serve as both a application server and reverse proxy, you can have the best of both worlds, without doing hack-y things like Boost, which basically generates a lot of static files.

You don't want to use those converters, as they usually rely heavily on ifs, which is a bad thing, when things normally can be handled pretty well with the "try_files"-directive.

[1] I've been using it in my stack for a couple of dozen Drupal sites for about two years now.

Walkman• 12 years ago

Way easier to configure than apache!

smoyer• 12 years ago

I know this is off-topic but I'm also surprised by Google Server's popularity. Can 10% of the top 1000 web-sites really be serviced by Google? You've got to pay for the reports, but I wonder if people using Google's CDN for static assets could be skewing those results. Does anyone have insight into the methodology used to collect this data?

babuskov• 12 years ago

They are probably counting each regional Google server as a separate "site" because it has a different hostname (different tld). There are easily 100 of those, esp. if YouTube counts as well.

Kurtz79• 12 years ago

Wouldn't most of those be Google own websites ?

If we consider a separate www.google.x for each country then we would get to around 100 very quickly, I guess.

The remainder would be filled by youtube, gmail, etc...

jqm4• 12 years ago

Did anyone else pause when they read the title line...

"Usage of web servers broken down by ranking".

I'm picturing a graph of the most commonly broken web servers for half a second.

jqm4• 12 years ago

I'll take the downvotes as a "no we didn't, and we think you are trying to be funny".

But, I actually did read that for a half a second and think the phrase "broken down" can be done without. It doesn't add anything in my opinion, I know it is broken down (its a graph), the phrase is unnecessary, and it caused me at least to stumble mentally for half an instant.

pjbrunet3• 12 years ago

Hypothetically, a company like Hyperspin could create a chart of webservers that were offline (most likely to break) in the past X days. I think the results would be interesting. Example: Out of 1,234 servers that were offline for > 1 hour in the last month, 40% Microsoft, 30% Apache, 20% NginX, etc.

reboog7112• 12 years ago

I'm confused by this title and the article here.

The graph in the linked shows that "Apache is used by 60.5% of all the websites." while nginx is at 20.7%...

How could these numbers possibly mean that nginx has replaced Apache as the most used web server? When is 60.5% more than 20.7%? IS it opposite day?

wtetzner• 12 years ago

You need to look at the legend. For the top 10,000 websites, Apache is used by 39.1%, and nginx is used by 39.2%.

reboog7112• 12 years ago

I see now; I didn't notice the distinction in the subject header here.

guardian5x• 12 years ago

There are different statistics with different methods and outcomes. For example the netcraft server survey over 975,262,468 sites shows a market share of Apache: 37.58%, IIS 33.41%, nginx 14.60%. Source: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-survey...

troymc• 12 years ago

"We didn't get the answer we wanted."

"Then reduce the sample size!"

coherentpony3• 12 years ago

How can I tell, by visiting a site, what web server is being used?

Garbage• 12 years ago

Mostly just by looking at "server" header. For example, Hacker News has server header as cloudflare-nginx

filenox• 12 years ago

curl -I www.ycombinator.com

This gives you the HTTP Header, example output: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Server: nginx Date: Mon, 26 May 2014 16:11:30 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 178 Connection: keep-alive Location: http://ycombinator.com/

coherentpony3• 12 years ago

Oh wow, that's cool. I didn't know that. Thanks.

manishsharan2• 12 years ago

We abandoned Apache as we found configuring Tomcat with Apache to be a major pain whereas configuring NGINX with Tomcat or other J2EE application servers is almost a no-brainer. Ditto with SSL termination. Since then we've moved all static file serving to NGINX as having both Apache and NGINX did not make sense. I know that a lot of other JVM shops did the same.

olavgg• 12 years ago

How do you do this? Are just using a proxy?

I use mod_jk with Apache. With mod_jk you use the AJP protocol to communicate with Tomcat. It's one line in your Apache config and a few lines in /etc/libapache2-mod-jk/workers.properties (Debian)

Are there any support for AJP for Nginx today?

manishsharan2• 12 years ago

Stuck on Mod_jk and AJP ? I feel your pain ; and I fled from it a long long time ago.

You don't need AJP with NGINX; this enables you to easily work with any J2EE app server or web server . I ran into issues with configuring glassfish with Apache and thus began using NGINX. Why bother with AJP ?

Yes setting up NGIX as a reverse proxy for Tomcat/ Glasshfish whatever is very simple. Setp a NGINX on your desktop and you will never have to connect to port 8080 ever again. Also it can serve static content while lettting your app server handle application urls.

Mitranim• 12 years ago

Curious how Node isn’t even mentioned. Interesting how many years until it catches up.

letney• 12 years ago

Probably never. As any site in the top rankings is likely going to be using nginx as a reverse proxy to node.js.

Nginx has replaced Apache as the most used web server among the top 10,000 sites

Related Stories