When it comes to a product which is based on a SaaS (Software As A Service) kind, bringing the data to customers faster and elegantly is a vital requirement. In products where User Interface is the main focus and when that is the first thing which comes into a customer’s mind when they analyse, we should give it more priority.
Now generally all projects are based on MVC (model view and controller). The view part which appears before the customer is totally dependent on the data retrieval from the model and controlling its flow to the view. For handling requests, we use web servers which help us send the request behind to be processed by the controller. When there was an analysis between two different open source web servers, choosing one among them went very interesting.
Those two web servers which I analysed were the giant apache and the growing nginx. Though apache is being used by most of the customers,because it is being available for a long time, nginx which was developed recently overcomes a lot of drawbacks of the apache server.
APACHE SERVER
The Apache web servers have been in use since 1995. Because the open-source Apache web server has been available for so many years, and has so many users, lots of modules have been written to expand its functionality – most of these are open-source as well.
In addition to bolstering its feature set, you can also take steps to increase Apache web server productivity with some performance tuning techniques. This presents ample opportunity for implementing straightforward enhancements.
NGINX SERVER
Nginx is an open source web server written to address some of the performance and scalability issues associated with Apache. NGINX provides all of the core features of a web server, without sacrificing the lightweight and high-performance qualities that have made it successful, and can also serve as a proxy that forwards HTTP requests to upstream web servers.
COMPARING NGINX AND APACHE
Apache creates processes and threads to handle additional connections. The administrator can configure the server to control the maximum number of allowable processes. This configuration varies depending on the available memory on the machine. Too many processes exhaust memory and can cause the machine to swap memory to disk, severely degrading performance. Plus, when the limit of processes is reached, Apache refuses additional connections.
Nginx does not create new processes for each web request, instead the administrator configures how many worker processes to create for the main Nginx process. (One rule of thumb is to have one worker process for each CPU.) Each of these processes is single-threaded. Each worker can handle thousands of concurrent connections. It does this asynchronously with one thread, rather than using multi-threaded programming.So nginx loads static content more faster than apache.
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