What does nginx do?

Nginx (engine x) is a high-performance HTTP and reverse proxy web server, and also provides IMAP/POP3/SMTP services. Nginx was developed by Igor Sesoev for Russia's second most visited Rambler.ru site (Russian: Рамблер). The first public version 0.1.0 was released on October 4, 2004.

It releases source code under a BSD-like license and is known for its stability, rich feature set, sample configuration files, and low system resource consumption. On June 1, 2011, nginx 1.0.4 was released.

Nginx is a lightweight web server/reverse proxy server and email (IMAP/POP3) proxy server, released under the BSD-like protocol. Its characteristics are that it occupies less memory and has strong concurrency capabilities. In fact, nginx’s concurrency capabilities do perform better among web servers of the same type. Users of nginx websites in mainland China include: Baidu, JD.com, Sina, NetEase, Tencent, Taobao, etc.

Nginx can be compiled and run on most UnixLinux OS, and there is a Windows ported version. The 1.4.0 stable version of Nginx was released on April 24, 2013. Under normal circumstances, for new sites, it is recommended to use the latest stable version as the production version. There is not a high urgency to upgrade existing sites.

Nginx’s source code uses a 2-clause BSD-like license.

Nginx is a very powerful, high-performance Web and reverse proxy service. It has many very superior features:

In the case of high concurrency of connections, Nginx is a good alternative to the Apache service. Product: Nginx is one of the software platforms often chosen by bosses in the virtual host business in the United States. Able to support responses of up to 50,000 concurrent connections. Thanks to Nginx for choosing epoll and kqueue as the development model.

Server

Nginx as a load balancing service: Nginx can not only directly support Rails and PHP programs to serve externally internally, but also support external services as an HTTP proxy service . Nginx is written in C, and its system resource overhead and CPU usage efficiency are much better than Perlbal.

Handle static files, index files and automatic indexing; open file descriptor buffering.

Cacheless reverse proxy acceleration, simple load balancing and fault tolerance.

FastCGI, simple load balancing and fault tolerance.

Modular structure. Including filters such as gzipping, byte ranges, chunked responses, and SSI-filter. If multiple SSIs present in a single page are processed by FastCG or another proxy server, this processing can run in parallel without waiting for each other.

Supports SSL and TLSSNI.

Code

Nginx code is written entirely from scratch in C language and has been ported to many architectures and operating systems, including: Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, AIX and Microsoft Windows. Nginx has its own function library, and in addition to zlib, PCRE and OpenSSL, the standard modules only use system C library functions. Furthermore, these third-party libraries may not be used if they are not needed or if potential licensing conflicts are considered.

Proxy server

As a mail proxy service: Nginx is also a very excellent mail proxy service (one of the earliest purposes of developing this product was also to serve as a mail proxy server) , Last.fm describes a successful and wonderful experience using it.

Nginx is a service that is very simple to install, has a very concise configuration file (it can also support perl syntax), and has very few bugs. Nginx is particularly easy to start and can run almost 24/7 without needing to be restarted even if it runs for several months. You can also upgrade the software version without interrupting service.

For more Nginx knowledge, please visit the Nginx usage tutorial column!

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