nginx [engine x] seems to be a strange word, huh.. but its very common among the sys admins who strive to make the webpage loading fast. Its one of the fastest webserver that we have ever came across.

According to the July 2009 Netcraft survey, nginx is now used on 10,174,573 domains, making it the fifth most popular web server.

Written by Igor Sysoev in 2005, Nginx now hosts between 1% and 4% of all domains worldwide.

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 most 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 clusters of servers.

Nginx powers several high-visibility sites, such as WordPress, Hulu, Github, Ohloh, and TorrentReactor.

You can access their wiki here

cyberciti.biz have helped me a lot in solving many linux issues and it contains a lot of good articles on nginx. Read them here

Tags: best web server, nginx