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Comment by donboscow | Hacker News Reader

Good to know. Any idea why Google chose to use custom servers instead of opting for Nginx or Apache? Specially when Nginx offers excellent load balancing capabilities in-built?

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Because their own can solve their problems better. Note that the Cloudflare reference is "used to" - just because you can use nginx at scale doesn't mean it's the best, and all such deployments aren't running stock nginx, and not nginx alone.

Got it. Thanks. Which servers are best suited to handle such high levels of load, and are available for free and open usage like Nginx or Apache is? I read that Apache has even more problems than Nginx.

Nothing wrong with NGINX. Read Cloudflare post on Pingora.

Different needs for different usecases where NGINX is more of an OOTB situation. NGINX is great. I see Caddy mentioned quite a bit, believe it’s written in Go where NGINX is written in C. Cloudflare wrote Pingora in Rust IIRC and I want to say they are releasing an open source flavor

Hmm I read the post. Cloudfare handles almost 1 trillion requests per day, Google does that per year. However, the request types are different, Cloudfare handles a variety of requests like caching and forwarding, while Google requests are about serving complete web pages. May be for the webserver purpose like Google Nginx may suffice?

I'm sorry but those numbers can't be right. Google Analytics is embedded in enough sites to hit a trillion hits a day.

Cloudflare serves web pages bro because they proxy the bytes between servers from origin to eyeball

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