On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 5:30 PM, Tim Bannister <is...@c8h10n4o2.org.uk> wrote:
> 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. > +1 Beyond the need to build APR and APR-Util, many people have other problems (reported to users@httpd list and Bugzilla) when attempting to perform seemingly simple builds -- collisions with pre-installed headers, difficulty with plugging in new OpenSSL, build logic that might find libxml2 at configure time but not find it at make time, yada yada yada. I think one aspect that makes this even worse: The nginx generally available in a lot of version (latest-1), (latest-2) distributions is sufficient, whereas the httpd in that same distribution is not, so more people are trying to build (or just using nginx). > > 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 -- Born in Roswell... married an alien... http://emptyhammock.com/
