Say what?

https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/community/why_use_it/

Why Use NGINX?

A couple benchmarks have shown NGINX to edge out other lightweight web servers and proxies, and to stomp out the not-so lightweight ones.

Some people say those benchmarks weren’t valid because the competition wasn’t tuned this way or that, etc. I tend to agree that benchmarks only tell part of the story and that there’s little you can do to truly remove bias from them anyway. (Has anyone ever seen a benchmark that everyone agreed was fair? Me neither.)

Anyway, instead of links to benchmarks for people to argue over (you can use Google to find them yourself if you like), what follows is quotes from people using NGINX in the real world, under real load, serving real applications and websites.

Please feel free to add your own testimonial, but see the Notes at the bottom of this page before you do.

Quotes

Several of the companies we invested in were able to solve significant scaling issues by switching their web platforms to NGINX. NGINX transparently and effectively enables the growth of the largest sites on the Internet today.

– Thomas Gieselmann, BV Capital

My advice to anyone running a web site today who is hitting performance constraints is to investigate whether they can use NGINX. CloudFlare has been able to scale over the last year to handle more than 15 billion monthly page views with a relatively modest infrastructure, in large part because of the scalability of NGINX. Our experience shows that switching to NGINX enables full utilization of the modern operating system and existing hardware resources.

– Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare

Both servers [Apache and NGINX] are capable of serving a huge number of requests per second, but Apache’s performance start decreasing as you add more concurrent connections whereas NGINX’s performance almost doesn’t drop! But here comes the best bit: because NGINX is event-based it doesn’t need to spawn new processes or threads for each request, so its memory usage is very low. Throughout my benchmark it just sat at 2.5MB of memory while Apache was using a lot more.

– WebFaction

I ran a simple test against NGINX v0.5.22 and Apache v2.2.8 using ab (Apache’s benchmarking tool). During the tests, I monitored the system with vmstat and top. The results indicate that NGINX outperforms Apache when serving static content. Both servers performed best with a concurrency of 100. Apache used four worker processes (threaded mode), 30% CPU and 17MB of memory to serve 6,500 requests per second. NGINX used one worker, 15% CPU and 1MB of memory to serve 11,500 requests per second.

– Linux Journal

Apache is like Microsoft Word, it has a million options but you only need six. NGINX does those six things, and it does five of them 50 times faster than Apache.

– Chris Lea