Why does nginx appear?

At first Nginx was regarded as a pet project, created by Russian system administrator Igor Sysoev. In 2002, at the age of 42, he started this project and released the first public shortcode in October of the same year. Like many leaders of open source projects, they always imagined everything would go smoothly when they first started. At the same time, he was working at Rambler, a rapidly growing Russian portal, and needed a processor that could handle more transactions than open source alternatives.

Nginx is the second most visited Rambler.ru site in Russia (Russian: Developed by Рамблер), the first public version 0.1.0 was released on October 4, 2004.

The first user - MP3 download site Zvuki

After he developed Nginx, he tested the source code on the Web properties of Rambler, but , Nginx was first used by MP3 download site Zvuki (this was 2003), then by an online dating service - Estonian; eventually, Nginx prompted Rambler to create its own photo-sharing site.

The number of Nginx users is close to 100, but users from English-speaking countries have difficulty understanding the software because most documents and discussion threads are in Russian. Therefore, the usage of Nginx has not been high. But by 2006, the situation changed. English-speaking users began to post to the Nginx discussion list. Even Russian compatriots in the United States and other regions helped promote the Nginx project and shared configuration files on blogs to help other users translate complex projects. Documentation files. In this way, the number of Nginx users will naturally increase.

WordPress abandons Apache and chooses Nginx

This matter can be traced back to 2008. At that time, the company insisted on moving WordPress to software. In line with its open source philosophy. At this time, Apache, the world's most famous web server, was the best choice. However, when engineers began to modify the software installation settings, Apache crashed, especially when WordPress was at its busiest. “We realized it wasn’t super stable when it came to generating traffic,” Barry Abrahamson, WordPress’ system manager, later said. So Automattic removed the unstable Apache and placed the company's bet on a then-obscure open source project called Nginx. Five years later, WordPress is still running smoothly on Nginx, so that many other companies have followed suit.

There was a time when the market share of some well-known web servers was declining sharply, while Nginx was growing continuously, as if this unpretentious philosophical concept provided it with sufficient power, and mastered Got the trick to handle countless web connections at the same time. According to a survey by Internet research organization Netcraft, Apache still occupies an unparalleled position in the field of web servers, but in the past two years, the use of Nginx has almost doubled.

The use of Nginx now accounts for 15% of all websites, including startups: CloudFlare and Parse (acquired by Facebook in the first half of this year), as well as Web giants: Automattic and Netflix. "We use Nginx for everything, and we run as much of our software stack as possible on Nginx," Abrahamson said. In many ways, it's an unlikely success story, but it's showing up globally The power of open source software is that anyone can use and modify it—for free.

Why Nginx is popular

CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince said that Nginx runs better on multi-core and multi-processor systems. In addition, Nginx is used in and Multiple Web users can stay connected without taking up more computer memory.

If the source code of Nginx cannot be tested, will users still consider using Russian software in an obscure state? Prince responded: "If it wasn't open source software, we wouldn't trust it at all." The bet was made. Today, companies use Nginx to serve more than a trillion requests every month. "The benefit of technology is that it elevates great technology to the forefront," Prince said. "If it solves the problem and is open source, you can go in and read its source code; when something bad happens, you can modify the code."

For more Nginx-related technical articles, please visit

Nginx usage tutorial

column to learn!

The above is the detailed content of Why does nginx appear?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!