On 20 Nov 2014, at 22:00, Jim Jagielski <j...@jagunet.com> wrote: > > Honestly though, how much of the uptake in nginx do people think is actually > due to nginx being "better" or the "best" choice, and how much do you think > is cue simply because it's *seen* as better or that we are seen as old and > tired? > > This is our 20year anniversary... It would be cool to use that to remind > people! :)
Here are some plausible explanations, off the top of my head but with editing. I reckon that at least some of the perception is down to Apache httpd being used in “enterprise” systems that are a long way back from the bleeding edge. If your mission-critical system is running a webserver release that's older than nginx itself then it's likely that nginx will look and work better. Another challenge is compatibility. As the default webserver on lots of distributions, httpd has a lot of existing users who don't want to see it break in an upgrade. For that reason, an upgrade typically won't convert an installation from prefork to another MPM. Install nginx… and it performs very differently; it's also complicated enough to merit a HOWTO. There won't be as many HOWTO guides about a one-line change to select a different MPM. There are now plenty of guides to building nginx from source. To be honest, this is a bit more straightforward than the equivalent task for httpd 2.4.x because operating systems that include httpd 2.2 may well have too-old APR and APR-Util as well. AIUI, nginx has fewer dependencies. Commercial support sounds nice. I think firms who'd pay for it would really like to get a commercially-supported web server bundled with their “enterprise” operating system. In that sense, Oracle and Red Hat are already offering commercial support for httpd. -- Tim Bannister – is...@c8h10n4o2.org.uk
