The encyclopedia · Software & IT · Technical decision · 2002–2019
nginx handled thousands of connections as events and became the web's top server
Igor Sysoev's asynchronous, event-driven web server used little memory under load, outran thread-per-connection rivals and sold to F5 for $670M.
nginx (NGINX, Inc.)
the move
In the early 2000s web servers assigned a thread or process to each connection, and high-traffic sites hit a wall around ten thousand simultaneous connections, the C10K problem. Russian developer Igor Sysoev began writing nginx in 2002 to solve exactly this for Rambler, a large Russian portal.
nginx treats connections as events handled by a small number of processes, so memory use stays low under load and behavior stays predictable. The same core serves as HTTP server, reverse proxy, content cache, load balancer and TCP/UDP or mail proxy, with a modular architecture.
First released in October 2004, nginx spread from Russian portals to a large fraction of the world's websites; nginx.org calls it the world's most popular web server per Netcraft. Nginx, Inc. was founded in 2011 for commercial support, and F5 acquired the company in March 2019 for approximately $670 million, keeping the founders.
why it works
- Event-driven handling keeps memory flat under many connections
- One server covers proxy, cache, load balancing and TLS
- An open-source base built a massive community and mindshare
- Low resource use made it cheap to run at scale
what transfers
When the bottleneck is a resource per connection, change the resource model: event-driven multiplexing beats adding hardware or threads, and one efficient server can replace a fleet.
what came after
Under F5, nginx remains both an open-source project and a commercial product family, used widely as the front end for web traffic and as the Kubernetes ingress controller standard. With the acquisition valued at about $670 million, the open-source community was explicitly part of what F5 bought.
references
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