Nginx01-Intro

NGINX WebServer Administration

NGINX is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, as well as an IMAP/POP3 proxy server. NGINX is known for its high performance, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.

NGINX is one of a handful of servers written to address the C10K problem. Unlike traditional servers, NGINX doesn’t rely on threads to handle requests. Instead it uses a much more scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture. This architecture uses small, but more importantly, predictable amounts of memory under load. Even if you don’t expect to handle thousands of simultaneous requests, you can still benefit from NGINX’s high-performance and small memory footprint. NGINX scales in all directions: from the smallest VPS all the way up to large clusters of servers.

Overview of nginx Architecture

Traditional process- or thread-based models of handling concurrent connections involve handling each connection with a separate process or thread, and blocking on network or input/output operations. Depending on the application, it can be very inefficient in terms of memory and CPU consumption. Spawning a separate process or thread requires preparation of a new runtime environment, including allocation of heap and stack memory, and the creation of a new execution context. Additional CPU time is also spent creating these items, which can eventually lead to poor performance due to thread thrashing on excessive context switching. All of these complications manifest themselves in older web server architectures like Apache's. This is a tradeoff between offering a rich set of generally applicable features and optimized usage of server resources.

From the very beginning, nginx was meant to be a specialized tool to achieve more performance, density and economical use of server resources while enabling dynamic growth of a website, so it has followed a different model. It was actually inspired by the ongoing development of advanced event-based mechanisms in a variety of operating systems. What resulted is a modular, event-driven, asynchronous, single-threaded, non-blocking architecture which became the foundation of nginx code.

Nginx uses multiplexing and event notifications heavily, and dedicates specific tasks to separate processes. Connections are processed in a highly efficient run-loop in a limited number of single-threaded processes called workers. Within each worker nginx can handle many thousands of concurrent connections and requests per second.