NGINX vs NGINX Unit

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NGINX

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NGINX Unit vs nginx: What are the differences?

NGINX Unit and Nginx are both popular web servers with similar capabilities but have some key differences that set them apart. Here are the main differences between them:

  1. Architecture: NGINX Unit is designed with a modular architecture that allows for dynamic customization. It supports multiple programming languages and can be easily extended and customized. On the other hand, Nginx has a monolithic architecture optimized for high performance and stability.

  2. Deployment: NGINX Unit can be deployed as a standalone application server, running independently of a web server. It can handle both static and dynamic content. In contrast, Nginx is primarily used as a reverse proxy server or a load balancer to distribute incoming requests to backend servers.

  3. Flexibility: NGINX Unit provides more flexibility in terms of application capabilities and configuration management. It allows developers to run multiple applications simultaneously, each with its own configuration and runtime environment. Nginx is known for its simplicity and ease of use, but it has less flexibility compared to NGINX Unit.

  4. Dynamic Everything: NGINX Unit supports dynamic configuration updates without requiring a server restart, making it ideal for scenarios that require frequent configuration changes. It also allows dynamic updates of SSL certificates, routing rules, and process isolation. Nginx, while highly performant, requires a reload or restart to apply any configuration changes.

  5. Programming Languages: NGINX Unit supports a wide range of programming languages such as PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, and more. It integrates with application servers and frameworks for seamless development and deployment. Nginx, on the other hand, has limited support for programming languages and mainly focuses on serving static content efficiently.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Nginx has a well-established and vibrant community with extensive documentation, plugins, and modules readily available. It has been around for a longer time and is widely supported by the open-source community. NGINX Unit, being relatively new, has a smaller community and ecosystem, but it is quickly growing, and more features, modules, and integrations are being added.

In summary, NGINX Unit offers a more flexible and dynamic application server solution with support for multiple programming languages. Nginx, on the other hand, excels as a reverse proxy and load balancer, with a strong community and extensive ecosystem.

Advice on NGINX and NGINX Unit

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!

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Replies (1)
Simon Aronsson
Developer Advocate at k6 / Load Impact · | 4 upvotes · 635.8K views
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I would pick nginx over both IIS and Apace HTTP Server any day. Combine it with docker, and as you grow maybe even traefik, and you'll have a really flexible solution for serving http content where you can take sites and projects up and down without effort, easily move it between systems and dont have to handle any dependencies on your actual local machine.

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Needs advice
on
Apache HTTP ServerApache HTTP Server
and
NGINXNGINX

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."

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Replies (3)
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

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.

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Leandro Barral
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I use nginx because its more flexible and easy to configure

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Christian Cwienk
Software Developer at SAP · | 1 upvotes · 604.9K views
Recommends
on
Apache HTTP ServerApache HTTP Server

I use Apache HTTP Server because it's intuitive, comprehensive, well-documented, and just works

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Decisions about NGINX and NGINX Unit
Grant Steuart
  • Server rendered HTML output from PHP is being migrated to the client as Vue.js components, future plans to provide additional content, and other new miscellaneous features all result in a substantial increase of static files needing to be served from the server. NGINX has better performance than Apache for serving static content.
  • The change to NGINX will require switching from PHP to PHP-FPM resulting in a distributed architecture with a higher complexity configuration, but this is outweighed by PHP-FPM being faster than PHP for processing requests.
  • The NGINX + PHP-FPM setup now allows for horizontally scaling of resources rather vertically scaling the previously combined Apache + PHP resources.
  • PHP shell tasks can now efficiently be decoupled from the application reducing main application footprint and allow for scaling of tasks on an individual basis.
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Pros of NGINX
Pros of NGINX Unit
  • 1.4K
    High-performance http server
  • 893
    Performance
  • 730
    Easy to configure
  • 607
    Open source
  • 530
    Load balancer
  • 288
    Free
  • 288
    Scalability
  • 225
    Web server
  • 175
    Simplicity
  • 136
    Easy setup
  • 30
    Content caching
  • 21
    Web Accelerator
  • 15
    Capability
  • 14
    Fast
  • 12
    High-latency
  • 12
    Predictability
  • 8
    Reverse Proxy
  • 7
    The best of them
  • 7
    Supports http/2
  • 5
    Great Community
  • 5
    Lots of Modules
  • 5
    Enterprise version
  • 4
    High perfomance proxy server
  • 3
    Reversy Proxy
  • 3
    Streaming media delivery
  • 3
    Streaming media
  • 3
    Embedded Lua scripting
  • 2
    GRPC-Web
  • 2
    Blash
  • 2
    Lightweight
  • 2
    Fast and easy to set up
  • 2
    Slim
  • 2
    saltstack
  • 1
    Virtual hosting
  • 1
    Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast
  • 1
    Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior
  • 1
    Ingress controller
  • 3
    PHP
  • 2
    Python
  • 2
    Golang
  • 2
    Multilang
  • 1
    Node.js
  • 1
    Ruby

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Cons of NGINX
Cons of NGINX Unit
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    Advanced features require subscription
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    What is NGINX?

    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.

    What is NGINX Unit?

    NGINX Unit is a dynamic web application server, designed to run applications in multiple languages. Unit is lightweight, polyglot, and dynamically configured via API. The design of the server allows reconfiguration of specific application parameters as needed by the engineering or operations.

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    What are some alternatives to NGINX and NGINX Unit?
    HAProxy
    HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.
    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.
    Traefik
    A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.
    Caddy
    Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go.
    Envoy
    Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.
    See all alternatives