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Nginx is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, as well as an IMAP/POP3 proxy server. Igor Sysoev started development of Nginx in 2002, with the first public release in 2004. Nginx now hosts nearly 7.65% (22.8M) of all domains worldwide.

Nginx is known for its high performance, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.

Nginx is one of a handful of servers written to address the C10K problem. Unlike traditional servers, Nginx doesn't rely on threads to handle requests. Instead it uses a much more scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture. This architecture uses small, but more importantly, predictable amounts of memory under load.
Even if you don't expect to handle thousands of simultaneous requests, you can still benefit from Nginx's high-performance and small memory footprint. Nginx scales in all directions: from the smallest VPS all the way up to clusters of servers.

Nginx powers several high-visibility sites, such as WordPress, Hulu, Github, Ohloh, SourceForge, WhitePages and TorrentReactor.

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Nginx 1.0 is released!

Here we go!
nginx-1.0.0 stable version has been released.
The repository is available at svn://svn.nginx.org.

Nginx development started about 9 years ago. The first public version 0.1.0 was released on October 4, 2004. Now W3Techs reports that 6.8% of the top 1 million sites on the web (according to Alexa) and 46.9% of top Russian sites use nginx.

Netcraft reports similar 6.52% nginx share of the million busiest sites in April 2011.

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Nginx book is available!

Clement Nedelcu has written the first English book covering Nginx including such topics as downloading and installing Nginx, configuring and using modules, and much more. It provides step-by-step tutorials for replacing your existing web server with Nginx. With commented configuration sections and in-depth module descriptions, you will be able to make the most of the performance potential offered by Nginx.

We were using Pound for load balancing at Justin.tv until today. It was consistently using about 20% CPU, and during spikes would use up to 80% CPU. Under extremely high load, it would occasionally freak out and break.

We just switched to Nginx, and load immediately dropped to around 3% CPU. Our pages feel a little snappier, although that might be my imagination. Not only is the config format easier to understand and better documented, but it offers a full webserver's complement of functionality. We haven't hit any spikes yet, but given the current performance I suspect it will cream Pound.

-- Emmett Shear


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