Overview

NGINX

Stacks115.0K

Followers61.9K

Votes5.5K

GitHub Stars28.4K

Forks7.6K

GeoServer

Stacks91

Followers82

Votes0

GitHub Stars4.2K

Forks2.3K

GeoServer vs nginx: What are the differences?

Introduction

In web development, both GeoServer and nginx serve essential roles, but they have key differences that set them apart in their functionalities and application.

Deployment: GeoServer is primarily designed for serving geospatial data, allowing users to publish, share, and edit geospatial data on the web. On the other hand, nginx is a versatile web server known for its high performance and scalability, commonly used for hosting websites and handling web traffic efficiently.
Functionality: GeoServer focuses on geospatial data management, providing tools for creating maps, generating map images, and serving them to clients through web services like WMS, WFS, and WCS. In contrast, nginx primarily functions as a reverse proxy server, load balancer, and HTTP cache, speeding up content delivery and ensuring server stability.
User Interface: GeoServer offers a web-based graphical interface for administrators to configure and manage geospatial data services, making it user-friendly for individuals working with maps and spatial data. On the other hand, nginx typically requires configuration through editing text-based configuration files, which may be more technical and less intuitive for users unfamiliar with server management.
Resource Consumption: GeoServer is resource-intensive, especially when processing complex geospatial data and generating dynamic maps on-demand, requiring sufficient memory and processing power to function optimally. In comparison, nginx is lightweight and efficiently uses system resources, making it suitable for handling high volumes of web traffic without consuming excessive server resources.

Summary

In summary, GeoServer is specialized for geospatial data management and web mapping services, while nginx excels in performance optimization, load balancing, and serving conventional web content efficiently.

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Advice on NGINX, GeoServer

greg00m

Mar 9, 2020

Needs advice

I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities.
Ready, aim fire!

766k views766k

Comments

jlp78

May 31, 2019

Reviewon

NGINX

I use nginx because it is very light weight. Where Apache tries to include everything in the web server, nginx opts to have external programs/facilities take care of that so the web server can focus on efficiently serving web pages. While this can seem inefficient, it limits the number of new bugs found in the web server, which is the element that faces the client most directly.

727k views727k

Comments

StackShare

May 29, 2019

Needs advice

From a StackShare Community member: "We are a LAMP shop currently focused on improving web performance for our customers. We have made many front-end optimizations and now we are considering replacing Apache with nginx. I was wondering if others saw a noticeable performance gain or any other benefits by switching."

725k views725k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

NGINX	GeoServer
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.	It is developed, tested, and supported as community-driven project by a diverse group of individuals and organizations. It is designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using open standards.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 28.4K	GitHub Stars 4.2K
GitHub Forks 7.6K	GitHub Forks 2.3K
Stacks 115.0K	Stacks 91
Followers 61.9K	Followers 82
Votes 5.5K	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 1453 High-performance http server 895 Performance 730 Easy to configure 607 Open source 530 Load balancer Cons 10 Advanced features require subscription	No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to NGINX, GeoServer?

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

lighttpd

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Swoole

It is an open source high-performance network framework using an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking I/O model which makes it scalable and efficient.

Puma

Unlike other Ruby Webservers, Puma was built for speed and parallelism. Puma is a small library that provides a very fast and concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby web applications.