On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 02:01:26PM -0700, Cliff Wells wrote:
> According to Netcraft, Nginx is now deployed in front of over 1 million
> domains. Not nearly as much as Apache, but clearly not all of those are
> "highly isolated environments". In fact, many sites with heavy traffic
> are moving to Nginx due to it's vastly superior scalability.
>
> Some notables that use Nginx:
>
> wordpress.com
> youtube.com
> hulu.com
> rambler.ru
> torrentreactor.net
> kongregate.com
>
> Where did you get your research from? (Actually, don't answer that, I
> can guess).
Sites that are amongst the largest on the internet fall into a corner
case in my mind. As Mike pointed out, sites have an unrealistic
expectation of traffic. I've been involved in the average cases.
My claims come from years in the service provider industry,
watching various deployments. I've been an Apache fan for a long
time, and have seen and deployed hundreds of servers, serving
thousands of sites on Apache. None are youtube.com - and I agree that
this is an important point.
Comparing my Apache deployments with deployments of other servers,
year after year, Apache won hands down:
1) Users of other HTTP servers are always fiddling with them,
restarting after crashes. This may be due to misuse, non-optimal
config - I'm not sure. But I've never had stability issues like this
with Apache.
2) Apache is well-understood by many more folks. There's an army of
support reps downstairs that are compentent, if not experts, at
maintaining and troubleshooting it. The other servers come across as
mysteries (despite often being highly trivial), and end up escalated
instead of fixed.
3) Documentation for Apache is through, searchable, and
understandable. It's full of examples, is available for multiple
versions of httpd. I have seen the Apache documentation turn
motivated people from competent levels to expert just by googling for
it. I'm not saying that other servers don't have decent docs - but
Apache's are amongst the best docs for any software I have ever read,
and I have seen them function in production for years.
> I'd qualify this paragraph as "some of Apache's strengths are", rather
> than a blanket "it's better". For some people, in some settings, it is
> better. For others it isn't. If you need high scalability, it isn't
> the best. If you need a small memory footprint it's not the best. If
> you prefer a sane configuration syntax it isn't the best. If you need
> all three then it's arguably amongst the worst.
Yea, you're right - I'm tacitly assuming that we're talking about the
average cases. Other http servers definitely excel at things, especially
for workloads they have been specially designed. But for every youtube
there's tens of thousands of websites with more average traffic and control
needs.
--
Ross Vandegrift
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who
make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians
have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine
man in the bonds of Hell."
--St. Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, Book II, xviii, 37
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