The 'Other' Open Source Web Server

nginx: Open Source Web server with a small footprint and high load handling capability.

From a distance it seems like there are no new Web servers under the sun. After all, in Internet time, Apache and Microsoft IIS have together cornered 85 percent of the market for generations. As the major players have grown in influence, they've also grown in other ways — complexity and resource usage, to name two. In some contexts, administrators are turning to lightweight Web servers tuned to perform specific tasks with great efficiency.

Nginx, or "engineX," is the open source project of Russian developer Igor Sysoev. Although its footprint on the overall Web server market remains small, nginx is said to power more than 20 percent of Russian servers. According to the most recent Netcraft Web Server Surveys, nginx deployment doubled from 1 million to 2 million sites between May and June 2008 alone, making it the second most popular open source Web server behind Apache (admittedly, a long way behind).

Read More Article...