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Why Use NGINX?

Real-world testimonials from companies serving real traffic.

"Several of the companies we invested in were able to solve significant scaling issues by switching their web platforms to NGINX."

— Thomas Gieselmann, BV Capital

"CloudFlare has been able to scale to handle more than 15 billion monthly page views with a relatively modest infrastructure, in large part because of the scalability of NGINX."

— Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare

"Both servers are capable of serving a huge number of requests per second, but Apache's performance starts decreasing as you add more concurrent connections whereas NGINX's performance almost doesn't drop! Throughout my benchmark it just sat at 2.5MB of memory while Apache was using a lot more."

— WebFaction

"Apache is like Microsoft Word, it has a million options but you only need six. NGINX does those six things, and it does five of them 50 times faster than Apache."

— Chris Lea

"I currently have NGINX doing reverse proxy of over tens of millions of HTTP requests per day on a single server. At peak load it uses about 15MB RAM and 10% CPU. Under the same kind of load, Apache falls over."

— Bob Ippolito, 2006

"We are regularly serving about 8-9k requests/second and about 1.2Gbit/sec through a few NGINX instances and have plenty of room to grow!"

— WordPress.com

"We've replaced our Squid + Apache setup with NGINX, and load average as well as CPU usage have been reduced by half. The new setup can handle two to three times as many requests per second."

— HowtoForge

"We switched to NGINX, and load immediately dropped to around 3% CPU. Our pages feel snappier."

— Justin.tv

"Each frontend proxy server maintains over 10,000 simultaneous IMAP, POP, Web & SMTP connections using only about 10% of the available CPU."

— FastMail.fm

"We're running NGINX on a machine with 8GB memory, but the NGINX process is only using 1.4MB."

— Philip Jacob

The Bottom Line

NGINX excels at:

  • Low memory usage - Handles thousands of connections in megabytes
  • High concurrency - Event-driven architecture scales better than process-based servers
  • Consistent performance - Performance stays stable under increasing load
  • Versatility - Web server, reverse proxy, load balancer, and mail proxy