nginx 1.0.0 released

[Posted April 12, 2011 by corbet]

Version 1.0.0 of the nginx HTTP and mail proxy server has been released. "nginx development was started about 9 years ago. The first public version 0.1.0 has been released on October 4, 2004. Now W3Techs reports that 6.8% of the top 1 million sites on the web (according to Alexa) use nginx. And 46.9% of top Russian sites use nginx." This server seems to have an active community of satisfied users who find it faster and easier to deal with than some of the alternatives. Some change information can be found in the changelog.

to post comments

nginx 1.0.0 released

Posted Apr 12, 2011 14:10 UTC (Tue) by przemoc (guest, #67594) [Link] (13 responses)

Igor Sysoev finally found a moment to release nginx-1.0.0 stable version, good news! Why? Because nginx is a great feature-wise and performance-wise server, yet maintaining small memory footprint.

Hope that Dotdeb will update nginx packages soon. Some Ubuntu PPAs already have 1.0.

BTW Maybe it's time for article about current state of modern web-related servers, such as cherokee, mongrel2, nginx, varnish and others. Or maybe there is up-to-date one that I missed recently?

nginx 1.0.0 released

Posted Apr 12, 2011 14:33 UTC (Tue) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link] (12 responses)

Seconded, I agree that a review of the state of modern web servers with the level of insight typical of LWN would be quite welcome. I also suspect that it would be a less than trivial undertaking: the line between web servers and web application servers is blurring, and once you get into app server territory, there's a whole ecosystem for each of the popular web development languages, even PHP isn't limited to mod_php anymore.

nginx 1.0.0 released

Posted Apr 12, 2011 16:04 UTC (Tue) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link] (11 responses)

nginx isn't just web, you can see it includes POP and IMAP proxy.

And you say app server...

If you are doing that, does node.js also go into that catagory ? Mostly used a webserver.

node.js pretty much seems to be currently kind of: one application == one network process, could be pretty much any network application. DNS, mail, HTTP(S) and so on.

So is that an app server too ?

nginx 1.0.0 released

Posted Apr 12, 2011 18:21 UTC (Tue) by anatolik (guest, #73797) [Link] (10 responses)

Does nginx work well with IPv6 and SCTP?

SCTP

Posted Apr 12, 2011 20:40 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (7 responses)

Who runs HTTP over SCTP?

SCTP

Posted Apr 13, 2011 0:46 UTC (Wed) by anatolik (guest, #73797) [Link] (6 responses)

SCTP has a hug huge potential in the Web. I would say "especially* in the Web - stream multiplexing is really important for HTTP.

http://www.cis.udel.edu/~leighton/

Currently browsers open multiple TCP connections but this is ugly and still a limitation for web-sites with a lot of images/js/css files. SCTP provides stream multiplexing out-of-box (as well as some other features). And I think sooner or later SCTP will replace TCP here.

Apache supports it that is why I am asking about nginx.

SCTP

Posted Apr 13, 2011 9:07 UTC (Wed) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (5 responses)

> SCTP has a huge huge potential in the Web.

I doubt it: if memory serves, a study found that only half of the ISP 'boxes' allow SCTP going through..

SCTP

Posted Apr 13, 2011 15:35 UTC (Wed) by anatolik (guest, #73797) [Link] (4 responses)

> only half of the ISP 'boxes' allow SCTP going through..

Thing are getting better. It is a slow process unfortunately - the same as for IPv6. ISPs do not like change anything until customers start leaving them.

From other side there is "SCTP over UDP" and it works really great with current configuration.

SCTP

Posted Apr 13, 2011 20:00 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (2 responses)

Google may have more luck with SPDY if it runs on unmodified equipment.

SCTP

Posted Apr 13, 2011 20:56 UTC (Wed) by anatolik (guest, #73797) [Link] (1 responses)

Personally I think that SPDY is more like an experiment rather than yet-another-layer to TCP/IP stack. And BTW it shows importance of stream multiplexing for modern webapps (30-40% latency reduce in case of SPDY).

But despite the fact that SPDY already implemented in Chrome I still feel that this is more workaround than a real solution. I think that some features (such as stream multiplexing) should go to the Transport Level (it means use SCTP), other part such as header compression should eventually land in the HTTP protocol. As I said SPDY looks like an experiment, a reference implementation of features that should be added to HTTP.

Besides that SPDY is for Web only, but SCTP can be used for wider range of applications that need several streams per connection.

SCTP

Posted Apr 13, 2011 23:24 UTC (Wed) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

You have to remember SPDY has 2 functions:

The first being bandwidth increase/latency reduction

The second being fast HTTPS (SSL/TLS) and HTTPS everywhere, atleast I think that is on purpose as I see different people from Google working on increasing not just the speed but also the 'safety' on the web.

The use of SSL/TLS isn't just a workaround old incompatible proxyservers and so on, it's a goal.

SCTP

Posted Apr 14, 2011 21:26 UTC (Thu) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]

The problem appears to be two-fold - first, there's no standard way of specifying the type of connection (the method used to declare IPv6 addresses was a dirty hack that cannot be generalized to specify arbitrary address schemes or arbitrary transport protocols), and second, SCTP won't work with NAT as things stand.

nginx 1.0.0 released

Posted Apr 12, 2011 21:35 UTC (Tue) by sbakker (subscriber, #58443) [Link] (1 responses)

Dunno about SCTP, but nginx works fine with IPv6.

nginx 1.0.0 released

Posted Apr 12, 2011 22:30 UTC (Tue) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

IIRC, last time I looked, it worked with IPv6 but if you added an IP access control rule using a IPv6 IP, it treated the rule as an "allow all".

nginx vs lighttpd

Posted Apr 12, 2011 16:28 UTC (Tue) by cabrilo (guest, #72372) [Link] (6 responses)

I've used lighttpd for all my light HTTP server needs so far. Can somebody knowledgeable compare these two, or better yet, tell us what makes nginx stand out among other non-apache http servers?

nginx vs lighttpd

Posted Apr 12, 2011 20:06 UTC (Tue) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152) [Link]

I would say that they are mostly similar (lighttpd and ngnx), the main difference for me is that development of lighttpd seams halted and one needs to recompile ngnx when adding modules.

nginx vs lighttpd

Posted Apr 12, 2011 20:38 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

The two are very similar. Both are well suited for low memory and high volume deployments. But Lighty had some long standing memory leaks that caused problems during high load which made me switch, and I found Nginx to have more active developers and larger mindshare.

I don't think pure static file hosting is very common, your web server is normally part of a larger ecosystem with application servers and so on. This is where the larger mindshare counts as more things are tested with Nginx. (Although none of them is close to the behemoth that is Apache in this regard.)

Well, they are similar but they had totally different goals...

Posted Apr 12, 2011 21:39 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, to understand the difference you should know their history. Lighttpd started as small and fast web server and later acquired the ability to work as proxy. Nginx was started because Apache's mod_proxy tweaking showed that you can not handle uber-highload because of Apache's design.

Basically Nginx is front-end for other servers (http and non-http) with the ability to serve static content directly while lighttpd is small and light web-server which can work as proxy, too.

They borrowed features from each other but to this day the difference remains. If you want simple and small web-server both will work, but lighttpd is simpler to setup. If you want effective and flexible front-end for your appserver - then nginx is probably better choice.

Well, they are similar but they had totally different goals...

Posted Apr 16, 2011 10:24 UTC (Sat) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] (1 responses)

Btw. Several years ago when I looked at web-hosting services provided by local broadband providers, I noticed SSI support to be curiously lacking in many of them. It's strange as its triviality should make it secure and CPU usage wise very lightweight compared to many other features that were offered (such as limited PHP support).

Any idea why SSI wouldn't be enabled in typical web-hosting setup?

Wikipedia states that it's supported by Apache, lighttpd and IIS.

SSI makes accounting quite complicated

Posted Apr 16, 2011 10:51 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

With SSI you lose the ability to easily see which requests are cheap (static pages) and which are expensive (php, cgi, etc). Worse: one request can spawn literally dozens of subrequests. And some of them may call scripts from other sites so it's not clear who should pay for them. This is accounting nightmare. So I'm not surprised people are disabling SSI for simlicity sake.

Note that NGINX was designed in particular to make SSI worthwhile: why would you use mod_proxy and not squid, for example? Right: with mod_proxy you can use SSI to stitch together answers from a few backend sites. But it turns out that Apache is VERY inefficient when used in this way. Worse: Apache itself works fine, but it's hard to tune it to lessen the load on backend servers. NGINX was developed from ground up to make it easy and fast... but accounting is still a problem.

nginx vs lighttpd

Posted Apr 12, 2011 23:49 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Basically, lighttpd is dead by now. Their last major release was 2 years ago.

Then they started rewriting it from scratch abandoning their 1.5 branch. There's some activity: http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/lighttpd2/repository - but it seems like we'll have to wait looong time for lighttpd 2.0 release.

Meanwhile, lighttpd is fairly nice but has a lot of deficiencies. Proxy module is limited, there's no HTTP 1.1 support, bad support for Java app servers integration, no support for transparent on-the-fly GZIP compression, etc. Some of these issues were fixed in the unreleased lighttpd 1.5, though.

nginx 1.0.0 released

Posted Apr 13, 2011 2:40 UTC (Wed) by apache2 (guest, #74324) [Link] (3 responses)

my apache 2.0.52 server now has 572 days uptime

have not used nginx but heard it is communist

never heard of a windies server with 572 days

never ever micro**** server 2008

never ha ha

nginx 1.0.0 released

Posted Apr 13, 2011 3:38 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

so that means that you are vulnerable to any bugs that have been patched in the last two years (or more if you are using a distro kernel that's further behind)

and that's assuming that you have updated apache and the rest of userspace (which from your attitude I would doubt)

yes nginx was initially developed by russian programmers, so what?

even if they are communists, again, so what?

do you ask the party affiliation of the US developers of the software that you use? I guarantee you that if you get into political discussions with a lot of open source developers you will walk away very upset much of the time (like everyone else,open source developers range all the way across the political spectrum

nginx 1.0.0 released

Posted Apr 13, 2011 5:20 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (1 responses)

http://httpd.apache.org/security/vulnerabilities_20.html

Might want to look into fixing that uptime problem there. Also, fixing your willingness to advertise software versions and excessive uptimes.

On the other hand...

Posted Apr 14, 2011 19:03 UTC (Thu) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]

There is some value in knowing Apache is under-advertising essential updates and that there are serious shortcomings in the education of Linux administrators. If more flaws were self-advertising, problems would be so much easier to solve.