NGINX

NGINX is a high-performance open-source web server, reverse proxy server, and load balancer created by Igor Sysoev in 2002 and first publicly released in 2004, handling over four hundred million websites worldwide including some of the highest-traffic sites on the internet, renowned for its event-driven asynchronous architecture that achieves exceptional concurrency and throughput with minimal memory consumption compared to traditional process-per-connection web servers. The event-driven architecture uses a small number of single-threaded worker processes, each capable of handling thousands of concurrent connections through an event notification system, achieving flat memory usage regardless of connection count and making it ideal for serving static content, proxying requests, and handling large numbers of simultaneous connections. The HTTP server features include virtual host configuration, URL rewriting with regular expressions, access control lists, gzip compression, bandwidth throttling, rate limiting, connection limiting, IP-based geolocation, and built-in support for HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 protocols with QUIC transport. The reverse proxy and load balancing supports round-robin, least-connected, and IP-hash distribution algorithms, health checks for upstream servers, automatic failover, session persistence through cookies, and weighted load distribution. The SSL and TLS termination handles certificate management, OCSP stapling, and forward secrecy cipher suites. The streaming media delivery supports MP4 and FLV pseudo-streaming. The mail proxy handles IMAP, POP3, and SMTP protocols. The company NGINX Inc., acquired by F5 Networks for six hundred seventy million dollars in 2019, offers NGINX Plus with enhanced features. Designed for system administrators, DevOps engineers, and infrastructure teams.