NGINX takes 2nd place in Web Servers from Microsoft IIS | Hacker News Reader

NGINX takes 2nd place in Web Servers from Microsoft IIS

zdnet.com

160 pointsGarbage34 comments

The original Netcraft article has far less filler text and contains far more information (with graphs!): http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2012/01/03/january-2012-we...

I don't understand the references to Google in those graphs. There isn't a publicly available Google webserver is there? Or is it included simply because a lot of the most visited properties on the web are Google's?

No it is not public, but it still serves a lot of sites, which is what this measures.

I submitted the Netcraft article four days ago, and it got a measly 2 upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3421864

EDIT: My title was also better.

I upvoted your comment. I hope it makes you feel better.

I upvoted your comment to thank you for your valuable contribution.

In the third graph, what caused the huge spike in almost every kind of server just after April last year?

Nginx is probably eating into Apache's share rather than IIS. It is safe to say that IIS has monopoly for those using .NET stacks. For the rest, it is Apache vs Nginx.

The data[1] seems to suggest that Apache's market share is growing, not declining, and that IIS is infact, in decline. May have something to do with reverse http proxying, or perhaps people are just moving away from the .NET stack in general.

[1]http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2012/01/03/january-2012-we...

According to my data, nginx and IIS have been neck and neck for months: http://underthesite.com/compare/nginx_and_microsoft-iis_and_...

Apache still blows them out of the water though.

(Ignore the pre-August data, it's before we had a real sample size.)

IIS and nginx are too close in this graph. It looks suspicious.

Isn't nginx more often than not used as a front controller for apache/tomcat/etc?

It can be used like that, however I am not sure if that's the most implemented method.

Personally I use Nginx > PHP-FPM, so there is no other web server on the box.

Earlier, nginx was used to handle just static content and passed the php stuff to apache httpd. These days people just use php-fpm instead so nginx can handle everything in a php based stack without needing apache.

Is this faster or the same speed? There is so much FUD around this topic that I've not been able to get through.

Nginx + php-fpm is MUCH faster than a vanilla apache httpd + php stack. The magic though, is not just speed. It's also the feature-set. I'm working on a pyramid(pylons) project right now and will be using nginx to load-balance the wsgi server instances and to serve static content. I don't think I could use apache for that. The configuration for nginx looks neater as well (my personal opinion)

Are you sure about that?

Benchmarks on my projects show that the difference is insignificant. Since I currently do not have memory constraints I am still using nginx + apache with mod_php.

I remembered the benchmarks as being well in nginx's favour but it seems I was mistaken. As maratd has noted above, apache with mod_php is faster.

But like I said, nginx is great for doing loads of things and I sort of "quit php" recently so I don't really care about php performance anyway.

Using mod_php with Apache IS faster than PHP-FPM, however, it uses MUCH more RAM. In a RAM constrained environment like a VPS, it simply isn't an option.

The latter part is simply not true - I run Apache with mod_php for a number of sites and web services on VPS's with little RAM without any problems, and that's alongside MySQL, Exim and SpamAssassin.

What's the traffic though?

I don't have exact figures, but each site probably gets a few hundred hits/day, and the mail server probably gets hit every few seconds. The OP made a sweeping "not an option" statement though, not "on a popular site hosted on a VPS".

Let me re-phrase. Using Apache + mod_php in a RAM constrained environment is not an option on any site that receives more than a dozen requests per second, assuming proper configuration. However, that figure is unbelievably limiting. The site can't be used for anything other than a very low traffic internal site or a dead blog. Even a tiny spike in traffic will destroy your setup. If you switch to Apache + PHP-FPM you can increase your capacity 10X with the same hardware. Literally. Most resources on a website are static and loading PHP for all of them is a pointless waste of RAM.

That title could mean anything. They are referring to total active sites across all domains.

IIS is still 2nd place if you look at the top one million busiest sites.

It's funny, I remember seeing similar numbers between IIS and Apache in the early 2000s right before the dot com bust. There's gotta be some correlation between number of new public internet sites and OSS Web Server adoption.

We've known for long time that horizontal scaling for large sites is only cost effective when you use an open source web server and aren't taking a hit for licensing.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/06/scaling-up-vs-scali...

It's more useful to look at the plot for the million busiest domains. nginx places 3rd and if trends continue, may take 2nd place from IIS some time in 2013/14.

I stopped using Apache and IIS years ago. Nginx is easy to setup and uses few resources on small servers. I don't do many sysadmin tasks, but this week I needed to modify my nginx setup on one of my own servers and even though I have not had to touch an nginx configuration in a long time I could do everything quickly and from memory. With Apache I would always start with the docs and/or web search.

(in market share)

That's true. IIS still leads in Frobs per Clonq index.

What other growth metric is there for a web-server besides market-share?

The metric that Apple afficionados like to tout, the profit derived metric. According to that, IIS is absolutely beating Apache and everyone else since they make billions every quarter off IIS.

Good point recoiledsnake; "IIS takes most of the profits" would sound their arguments.

The title was "takes 2nd place". Saying the same about anything else would also be ambiguous, though I admit web servers don't have many other legit ways to take 2nd place. My first impression was that they were going to talk about performance.

In terms of traffic served Nginx has probably already passed Apache since it's not feasible to use Apache as a front end server.

Rubbish. Not only is it completely feasible, (and easy) to use Apache as a front end server, not only is it incredibly common, but we have absolutely zero evidence that Nginx has passed Apache, and considerable evidence to the contrary. You're suffering the Hacker News bubble effect.

EDIT: BTW, I'm not an Apache fanboy. I recently moved my personal site https://grepular.com/ from Apache to Nginx. I just like using the right tools for the right job. And Apache is a great server and can be configured to perform extremely well. I've personally configured and run large server farms of Apache boxes in shared hosting environments.

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