Overview

NGINX

Stacks114.7K

Followers61.9K

Votes5.5K

GitHub Stars28.4K

Forks7.6K

OpenResty

Stacks2.3K

Followers227

Votes0

OpenResty vs nginx: What are the differences?

OpenResty and Nginx are both popular web server and reverse proxy server solutions. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Architecture: OpenResty is a full-fledged web application server built on top of Nginx, integrating Nginx with LuaJIT, whereas Nginx is a lightweight and high-performance web server and reverse proxy server.
Extensibility: OpenResty provides extensive capabilities for dynamic content generation and processing through Lua scripting, allowing developers to extend Nginx functionality with custom Lua modules, whereas Nginx primarily relies on modules written in C for extensibility.
Functionality: OpenResty offers advanced features such as dynamic content generation, request routing, authentication, caching, and content compression directly within the Nginx server, whereas Nginx focuses on serving static content, proxying requests, and load balancing.
Ease of Use: OpenResty may have a steeper learning curve due to its Lua scripting integration and additional functionalities, making it more suitable for developers with Lua programming experience, while Nginx is relatively easier to configure and deploy for basic web server tasks.
Performance: OpenResty can achieve high performance and efficiency for dynamic content generation and processing, especially when leveraging LuaJIT's just-in-time compilation capabilities, whereas Nginx excels in serving static content and handling high volumes of concurrent connections efficiently.
Community and Ecosystem: Nginx has a larger and more mature community and ecosystem, with extensive documentation, tutorials, and third-party modules available, whereas OpenResty has a smaller but growing community focused on Lua scripting and OpenResty-specific modules and applications.

In summary, OpenResty extends Nginx's capabilities with Lua scripting, offering advanced features for dynamic content generation and processing, while Nginx focuses on serving static content and proxying requests efficiently. Although OpenResty provides enhanced functionality, it may require a higher level of expertise in Lua programming, whereas Nginx remains a versatile and straightforward solution for many web server tasks.

Advice on NGINX, OpenResty

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

Grant

Developer at GMS LLC

Sep 5, 2020

Decided

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.

429k views429k

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.

726k views726k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

NGINX	OpenResty
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.	OpenResty (aka. ngx_openresty) is a full-fledged web application server by bundling the standard Nginx core, lots of 3rd-party Nginx modules, as well as most of their external dependencies.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 28.4K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 7.6K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 114.7K	Stacks 2.3K
Followers 61.9K	Followers 227
Votes 5.5K	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 1452 High-performance http server 894 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, OpenResty?

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.