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Comment by For_Iconoclasm | Hacker News Reader

I feel the same way. Nginx has been the little ngin that could, supported by a bunch of talented hackers dedicated to bringing something to the table that the big-time servers, even the open source ones, couldn't. Nginx's history of being the lightweight, faster competitor to Apache (a shining example of success in the open source world) practically defines its identity.

I just hope that nginx doesn't sell out. I don't think it will, because I can't see what it has to gain for becoming exactly like its competitors when it already has a substantial user base. Of course, as you stated, dividing the userbase between enterprise edition users and free edition users could cause some software development political issues that could stifle progress.

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Nginx is one of those rare products where I felt no need to upgrade from the now-ancient 0.7.6 version because it just does everything I need well. Truly an amazing little piece of code, on par (in my books) with venerable oldies like qmail.

I almost agree, i.e. second-level-legacy 0.7.x line is good enough for most of web needs, so indeed there is no really strong urge to upgrade to the current stable, though some nice features came later. What I do not agree is keeping really old 0.7.6 instead of upgrading to safer and more stable 0.7.6y (and if you do, going to the latest 0.7.69 is obviously the best solution).

Upgrading to at least the latest minor version (0.7.6y as you say) may indeed be a good idea since there have been some security vulnerabilities discovered e.g.

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-2629

Not sure if this poses any real danger in practice, but still -- better be safe than sorry.

That is also true. You can use that version for as long as you want! The company I work for uses a newer stable version of nginx in production, but I think I actually make use of a directive that was introduced after the 0.7 series. Even so, as a small company with only a few customers, we're okay sticking a little closer to the edge. At this point, there's no compelling reason for us to upgrade past where we are (I think 0.98) unless I want bug fixes for things bugs we haven't seen.

It's worth keeping an eye on the current development version goes stable. 1.1.4[1] introduced preliminary HTTP/1.1 reverse proxying which means persistent connections to the backend and thus less overhead.

[1] http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?27,215419,215419#msg-215419

There are also a ton of bug fixes related to CPU hogging and caching that makes it worth upgrading, especially considering how painless it is.

My computer club has used nginx since it first came out in 2004. We also had a bit of contact with Igor to get it running on Solaris. Since then it has been a very reliable piece of web infrastructure for us, and I wish Igor and the rest of the team the best of luck. I have high hopes that really great things will come out of this.

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