[ Thanks to Amy
Bennett for this link. ]
“For the better part of the last decade, the choice for Web
server software has been pretty stable. Apache has been used on the
majority of Web servers while Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information
Services) is used across many of the rest. Over the past few years,
however, use of a third entrant, Nginx (pronounced “engine-x”), has
been on the rise, thanks to the software’s ability to easily handle
high-volume traffic.“Nginx is already run on 50 million different Internet domains,
or about 10 percent of the entire Internet, the developers of the
software estimate. It is particularly widely used on highly
trafficked Web sites, such as Facebook, Zappos, Groupon, Hulu,
Dropbox, and WordPress. Not surprisingly, the software’s creator,
Igor Sysoev, designed Nginx in 2004 specifically to handle a large
numbers of concurrent users — up to 10,000 connections per server.
‘It is a very lean architecture,’ said Andrew Alexeev, a co-founder
of a company that offers a commercial version of the software,
called Nginx.”