"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)..."
