nginx – hugely popular open source web server

nginx is a free, lightweight, open-source, very powerful and efficient web server and reverse proxy. It uses a scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture in contrast to a threaded or process-oriented approach to handling requests. This architecture uses small, but more importantly, predictable amounts of memory under load.

This server can be used as standalone HTTP server and as a reverse proxy server before some Apache or another big server to reduce load to backend servers by many concurrent HTTP-sessions.

nginx can also act as a POP3/IMAP mail proxy with SSL and TLS SNI support.

Features include:

• Handling of static files, index files, and auto-indexing.
• Accelerated reverse proxy with caching.
• Load balancing.
• Fault tolerance.
• Accelerated support with caching of remote FastCGI servers; simple load balancing and fault tolerance.
• IPv6 support.
• Low memory usage and high concurrency.
• Modular architecture. Filters include gzipping, byte ranges, chunked responses, XSLT, SSI, and image resizing filter. Multiple SSI inclusions within a single page can be processed in parallel if they are handled by FastCGI or proxied servers.
• SSL and TLS SNI support.
• Name-based and IP-based virtual servers.
• Keep-alive and pipelined connections support.
• Flexible configuration.
• Reconfiguration and online upgrade without interruption of the client processing.
• Access log formats, buffered log writing, and quick log rotation.
• 3xx-5xx error codes redirection.
• The rewrite module.
• Access control based on client IP address and HTTP Basic authentication.
• The PUT, DELETE, MKCOL, COPY and MOVE methods.
• FLV streaming.
• MP4 streaming.
• Speed limitation.
• Limitation of simultaneous connections or requests from one address.
• Embedded Perl.
• WebDAV.
• Keepalive connections may be closed prematurely.
• Support for keepalive connections to upstream servers.
• Consolidation of multiple simultaneous requests to upstream servers if caching is used.
• Support for multiple request and connection limits used simultaneously.
• Reduced memory consumption in various edge cases like handling of long-lived requests.

Website: nginx.org
Support: Wiki, Code Repository
Developer: Nginx, Inc.
License: 2-clause BSD

nginx is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Return to Web Servers | Return to Web Caches | Return to Load Balancers

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