Nginx, the little Russian web server taking on the giants

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

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/

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

I think it takes time to gain that expertise.

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

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

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

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.

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

.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.

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

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

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.

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

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

nginx config files are logical

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.

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