Nginx Overtakes Microsoft As No. 2 Web Server

tsamsoniw writes "With financial backing from the likes of Michael Dell and other venture capitalists, open source upstart Nginx has edged out Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server) to hold the title of second-most widely used Web server among all active websites. What's more, according to Netcraft's January 2012 Web Server Survey, Nginx over the past month has gained market share among all websites, whereas competitors Apache, Microsoft, and Google each lost share."

Comments

Finally!

[Voyager529]

something that's actually legitimate for Netcraft to confirm!

Re:Finally!

[cwj123]

Wait.. BSD isn't dead?

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait.. BSD isn't dead?

They changed its name, they call it "Mac OS X" nowadays.

Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Nginx is a great product. Not surprised.

Re:Quality

[telekon]

1) Hell yes, it's easier to configure than Apache. Has most of the plugins you could want from Apache, whilst being much more lightweight.

2) I'll echo the other comment here, YOU HAVE THE SOURCE CODE. Worry about backdoors in IIS from the U.S. Gov't., nginx has way more eyes on it.

3) You eventually figured out the pronunciation. Most of the people I know that use GNU/Linux and LaTeX ca't pronounce GNU or LaTeX, but they work great so they get used. What's the problem?

Re:Quality

[exomondo]

So I say, why not just call it EngineX.

Just be thankful it's not named Libre Nginx.

Re:Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing that makes me dubious is that they're based in Russia, I hope Putin and his boys don't have a back door into it.

Right, because the evil Russians can easily hide a backdoor in the source code. You're much safer using software made by a company that obeys the NSA.

Re:Quality

[man_of_mr_e]

I am quite surprised. nginx may be a good product, but it's also lacking a lot of functionality that a web server used as a load balancer or cache should support. For example, it doesn't support HTTP 1.1 to the backend, thus it can't do name based virtual hosts on the servers it caches.

I *WANTED* to use nginx for a large multi-tennant website we were building, but it didn't support it.

Re:Quality

[GP1911]

They're usually backend errors, nginx is often used as a reverse proxy.

Re:Quality

[amorsen]

I don't use nginx, but:

By default, the Host header from the request is not forwarded, but is set based on the proxy_pass statement. To forward the requested Host header, it is necessary to use:

proxy_set_header Host $host;

I haven't heard of a web server which refuses to accept Host headers just because the client sends HTTP/1.0 instead of/1.1.

market share v. reality

[girlintraining]

I'm firmly convinced the main reason IIS is even in the top 10 is because so many large corporations sign secret agreements with Microsoft to get discounted software in exchange for not using "free" or "open source" software. No joke -- I am working at a company right now where it is banned, and the only reason given is either that "info security" said so, or "legal" did. But when pressed, nobody can quite identify why. It's just policy, and nobody questions it. IIS' market share is vastly inflated; If it weren't for these clandestine agreements, I sincerely doubt it would be deployed very often, even WITH all the MS tech tie-ins, there's too many compelling reasons not to use it. Even Microsoft doesn't use it on it's major websites because it doesn't scale and it is prone to failure.

Re:market share v. reality

[Kalriath]

Bullshit. Microsoft uses it on every site they have. The only reason that "web server identification" surveys like Netcraft say they run Linux is because, like all large websites, they utilise the services of a CDN such as Akamai.

And there are no "secret agreements". Most of the time the company forbids such things is because there is no support, or because there is no ability of the in-house technical support to provide assistance with it. We're a very large IT company here and we have maybe 3 RHEL servers (because Linux was the best option for the task) and a couple of thousand (including virtual) Windows servers. (There's also about 2 Solaris servers, 4 or 5 Oracle Linux servers, a SCO Unix server and 2 or 3 HP-UX servers). None of this is due to any "secret agreements". It's all because there's one person trained to work with Unix based systems, and about 8 to deal with Windows. We utilise quite a large number of open-source packages across our infrastructure if it's the best tool for the job.

Re:market share v. reality

[Anonymous Coward]

In my last job, we had a client with an all Windows environment. We're talking 2 DCs, a file server, an exchange server and a dedicated IIS server on the other side of the firewall and off the domain.

One day, they decided to revamp their static HTML website (this was a government department trying to justify their existence, IT wasn't exactly at the top of their list). We talked to the outfit doing it, who told us they were using PHP. Great, I though. We can get rid of an old and outdated Windows server and replace it with a nice, lean little Linux box. Nope, I was told to install the PHP ISAPI module on IIS, because "we were a Microsoft shop", even though this server was quite literally doing nothing but serving up HTML and chewing up an unnecessary Server 2k3 license. So after much fighting, and arguing to explain that we may as well NOT go through the trouble trying to set up and debug PHP as FastCGI, another guy went behind my back and stuffed up the install, leading to me wasting 3 or 4 hours rolling it back and installing it properly. Anyway, it's all smoothed over, until I get the zip file I've been promised by the "website makers". It was indeed a website, 10 or so DreamWeaver files with the extension renamed to PHP. No Drupal theme, no Joomla install, nothing. -.- God I hate the people in this industry that like to sell themselves as professionals

Re:market share v. reality

[icebraining]

Even Microsoft doesn't use it on it's major websites

curl -v www.microsoft.com
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
 
curl -v www.hotmail.com
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

What sites are those, exactly?

Re:market share v. reality

[epiphani]

There's some truth to this.

Several years ago, GoDaddy switch all of their domain parking to IIS, explicitly to get microsoft's numbers up. Throw 10,000 cnames pointed at a single machine serving up parking pages, and boom - 10,000 websites running IIS.

Re:market share v. reality

[Daniel Phillips]

We're a very large IT company here and we have maybe 3 RHEL servers (because Linux was the best option for the task) and a couple of thousand (including virtual) Windows servers.

Wow, it must suck to work where you work. Could you please tell me the name so that I may have nothing to do with it?

Re:market share v. reality

[Zalbik]

What the heck?

The office live 365 agreement says nothing about not using competitors software.

I think you need a new tinfoil hat...

Re:market share v. reality

[Anonymous Coward]

The deals were public knowledge. The OEM deals of the time that resulted in the court cases were actually legal until MS was declared a monopoly. Companies have always made such deals and continue to make them, they were not anything special and only become a problem under monopoly rulings.

Re:market share v. reality

[SadButTrue]

This has probably always been the case. However, using .NET means buying the entire Microsoft stack.

At my last job I wrote an entire back office in Java. When my company merged the decision was made, over my vehement protests, that we would recode in c# just to support a thick client that was the bread and butter of the traders at the other company. Literally everything had to be moved just because it had been marginally easier to code a desktop app in c# initially.

Microsoft makes some good stuff, they really do. But since MS stuff only works well, or at all, with MS stuff you may end up taking a heavy does of shit along with the good.

Re:market share v. reality

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually www is fronted by reverse proxies running on linux (you can check with nmap). IIS apparently can't handle the load by itself.

And, hotmail took a long time to convert to M$. They tried once, then had a two week outage since M$ didn't scale worth a shit. They rolled back to Solaris, and kept it that way for a _long_ time.

Fun fact. Microsoft also used sendmail on sun boxes for internal mail for a long time after exchange was introduced. M$ couldn't get their own software to scale to an enterprise as large as their own.

Re:market share v. reality

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, it must suck to work where you work. Could you please tell me the name so that I may have nothing to do with it?

Microsoft Corporation, Redmond WA

Re:market share v. reality

[Dynedain]

Also, the cost of a Windows license for a small shop like that would pay for itself probably 3 times over if they had to even try to get some kind of professional support for the Linux box even once.

A Windows license doesn't magically come with professional support. And honestly, if you need professional support for a server *NIX is going to cost you the same as an equally competant Windows admin.

If you can't handle management of a web server in-house with qualified staff, you should move to a hosted solution. It will cost less regardless of OS choice.

Re:market share v. reality

[am 2k]

Unlike smelly hippies, they're not going to trash a perfectly good service just because of rah rah candy ass confusion of software and ideology.

I guess you weren't around yet when they switched Hotmail from BSD to Windows?

Wow, never even heard of that one

[Nursie]

I've used a load of web servers in the last few years - an early verion of IIS when I had only windows many years back, apache, lighttpd, thttpd, netscape web server (showing my age) and various others... but I didn't even know this was out there.

Suppose it just shows how out of the loop I am these days. Computer stuff covers a vast field these days.

Re:Wow, never even heard of that one

[bradgoodman]

I was going to say the same. So I was pretty surprised. From what I am reading, it is more of a "front-end" system for web servers, that does things like caching and load-balancing. So I guess it sort of depends on ones definition of "web server".

I was also going to speculate/wonder if it was one of those "rigged" deals, like a few years back when IIS was declared as "overtaking firefox" and becoming #1 because "most web sites on the web used it". The actual reason was that GoDaddy (which hosts a vast majority of "parked" domains) was paid-off (or "otherwise incented" by Microsoft to switch to IIS. So when you considered a "www." to be a "unique site", and 99% of "unique sites" to be garbage parked-domains, IIS was not the leader.

So, I wonder if some other bizarre statistical work is at-play. For example, does someone like Akamai, who hosts a lot of other people's sites, use Nginx to skew these numbers??

Re:Wow, never even heard of that one

[asserted]

no, this is genuine. it has been steadily gaining popularity over the past several years.
nginx is being developed by a russian guy who up until recently was working (as a sysadmin, apparently) for one of the major russian web portals where nginx originated as an in-house project first but was open-sourced. the guy has now left the company (which has been slowly dying anyway) and incorporated an llc or something, focused on nginx. it was already quite popular in russia 5-6 years ago (when i was still living there).

nginx is an efficient event-driven front-end server, quite often used for loadbalancing in front of traditional apache or tomcat or whatever other backends, but in a simple case of a LAMP server it can be hooked up directly to PHP via FPM or FCGI.
config syntax is quite expressive, with quite advanced uri / header - based rewriting capabilities. there is even a built-in Perl interpreter for more advanced use (which tends to be abused by people who forget what being an event-driven server means by sticking logic in there... oh well, people use things like node.js too *shudder*).

Google Icon

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is the Google icon on the post when its MS that got overtaken. Is Nginx run by Google?

Great loadbalancer

[Anonymous Coward]

Nginx is a great loadbalancer for http which makes it quite suited as a frontend and thus getting counted by netcraft . There could be hundreds of apache servers behind it . E.g. on my boxes Nginx runs as a reverse proxy in front of about 20 different apache, tomcat, more Nginx, other servers that generate some kind of html. But these 20 will all be counted as Nginx while they actually run something different. So I beleive it is quite hard to actually say what Server actually is the most popular.

Re:Great loadbalancer

[inKubus]

Yep, it's mostly used for front-end duties like connection pooling, load balancing, SSL offloading, gzip, that type of thing. If you're running PHP stuff, it's still debatable whether you want to go FCGI or PDM instead of Apache's built-in module. There are ups and downs in both cases and you'll have to see what works best for your site. At my company we use Nginx up front (with server type obfuscated) for SSL offloading and gzip and connection pooling. From there it goes into a varnishd cache on the same server (stored in 100% RAM) which handles the static stuff. Varnishd then forwards remaining requests to an L7 load balancer appliance type thing which then drops requests to each of 10 web "application" servers which are a combination of Apache with mod_php, Tomcat and Jetty Java servers. We've also used Nginx as an IMAP proxy and cache and it works quite well for that.

Apache has a good architecture but it's horrible at handling a lot of simultaneous connections and recycling them (that will change in 2.4 but it's not out yet). Also, if you're using mod_php, over time each Apache process will take the total maximum amount of RAM your php process uses, and many of our PHP applications use 128-256M of RAM or more (data management type stuff). So you can run a server out of RAM if you're trying to maximize connections.

Nginx can handle 10K connections on a little box with very little RAM due to the way it threads stuff. It's basically a copy engine and it's very fast. Varnishd can also handle a lot of connections and can serve up content straight from RAM in less time than apache takes to build a connection. That being said, Apache is reliable, and has I feel better logging at the moment and just more of everything. It's a reference implementation. It's actually fine for most purposes but if you're handling 1000 users simultaneously and they are making 10-20 connections each with various service calls and static downloads, you gotta have something that can pool the conenctions on the front end and handle static content or you're going to spend a lot of money on RAM. And if you're serving up static content with Tomcat, Tomcat is absolutely garbage. I think it has to boot the whole JVM to serve up your one file. If not that bad, it's still awfully slow, and it REALLY benefits from caching up front. BTW, Nginx does caching as well but varnishd seemed more mature and elegant.

Now lastly, you can just go out and buy an F5 BigIP and it does all this stuff on specialized hardware (Ok, special board, intel chip) and it's out of the box. But even the little ones are $20K which is a lot of software dev hours and/or web server/database/storage hardware. Would be nice and fun to have but if you can't spend the money on hardware (and training!) the nginx/varnishd frontend is pretty much the best setup in my book at the moment. A little complex but once it's set up you just let it run. I made an internal nginx cache for all our internal sites, including some Java apps (e.g. Jira) and with requests going through the cache everything just flies. If you use sharepoint on IIS, you would be prettty stupid to not try a cache server up front, it's amazing. If nginx fixed mod_rewrite stuff to be the same as apache, it would probably be possible to make it into an application server, and we're going to get a test environment set up with php-fpm and see how it fares. We'll see how managable it is though.

...and efficiency

[hcs_$reboot]

I'm glad such a program, well designed and programmed in good old C, is rewarded with trust and confidence from more and more engineers.
I have been using it for two years, serving several professional sites, and the transition from the initial Apache setup was surprisingly smooth.

What I like in particular, compared to Apache :
- fantastic performance gain, in terms of cpu and memory
- maintenance gain: the configuration appears (at least to me) to be more "developer like", and easier to configure/extend with many options
- load balancing is ... really a piece of cake

The only drawback I (initially) found was the lack of a PHP embedded/module. But using php-fpm happened to be a good alternative, via a local port.

Re:Nginx is primarily a cache engine

[telekon]

Not always... for our Rails (and Sinatra) projects, we use nginx as the frontend/static asset server to a (pool of) Ruby-based application servers (mostly Unicorn). There's no Apache anywhere in the mix, and that has greatly reduced my migraines. Perhaps in some situation it makes sense to have nginx as a cache engine or load balancer for Apache, but in my world, nginx usually replaces Apache, rather than supplementing it.

Oh, lovely

[gman003]

Guess what class I had today?

CIS311 - Web Server Management

Guess what we use!

IIS 7 and Windows Server 2008!

Good thing I've run both Apache and lighttpd for personal experience. And taught myself C, C++, PHP, Lisp, Perl, Python, and a little bit of Assembly. And MySQL. And how to run Linux from the command line. And... what the fuck am I paying this college for, again?

Re:Oh, lovely

[Confusador]

And... what the fuck am I paying this college for, again?

The ability to get your resume past HR and in front of someone who knows what any of that means. Sorry.

Re:IIS still wins

[Overly Critical Guy]

The metric "Apple aficionados" use is the one where the iPhone is the top-selling handset. For some reason, you're comparing a phone to an operating system. If you actually compare mobile operating systems, iOS has more share due to iPads and iPods.

IIS will become legacy software

[RoLi]

Nonsense. IIS will become a legacy product

The share in Japan, Germany, Russia and many other countries already lies below 4% for many years. But also traditionally Microsoft-friendly countries can turn away from IIS, for example in the last 10 years, the share in France fell from 35% to 5%, in Brazil and Taiwan from over 45% to 15% and in India even from 65% to 18%.

IIS will probably be able to hold out another 10 years, but in the long term it's future is far from rosy.

Re:IIS will become legacy software

[RoLi]

IIS loses everywhere, also in the "top 1 million" - category on Netcraft.

I guess the one million websites with the most traffic are not "farting around", right?

Re:IIS will become legacy software

[Bert64]

Apache and nginx are both used for plenty of high traffic websites...

Not so long ago MS were also paying large domain registrars to host their parked sites (ie empty sites, but lots of them) on IIS to artificially inflate the netcraft stats.

Re:IIS will become legacy software

[Ice Tiger]

IIS is used for industrial strength websites for corporations, online shopping sites, etc... People use IIS for _real work_, .

That is correct, but a lot more corporations use non IIS solutions for industrial strength web sites.

Public internet sites..

[RightSaidFred99]

Not all sites. IIS is used massively on the corporate interanet.