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nginx vs Passenger: What are the differences?
What is nginx? A high performance free open source web server powering busiest sites on the Internet. 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 Passenger? A fast and robust web server and application server for Ruby, Python and Node.js. 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.
nginx and Passenger belong to "Web Servers" category of the tech stack.
"High-performance http server" is the top reason why over 1437 developers like nginx, while over 43 developers mention "Nginx integration" as the leading cause for choosing Passenger.
nginx and Passenger are both open source tools. nginx with 9.1K GitHub stars and 3.43K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Passenger with 4.41K GitHub stars and 505 GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, nginx has a broader approval, being mentioned in 8669 company stacks & 2556 developers stacks; compared to Passenger, which is listed in 380 company stacks and 40 developer stacks.
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!
NGINXI 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.
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."
NGINXI 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.
NGINXI use nginx because its more flexible and easy to configure
Apache HTTP ServerI use Apache HTTP Server because it's intuitive, comprehensive, well-documented, and just works
For us, NGINX is a lite HTTP server easy to configure. On our research, we found a well-documented software we a lot of support from the community.
We have been using it alongside tools like certbot and it has been a total success.
We can easily configure our sites and have a folder for available vs enabled sites, and with the nginx -t command we can easily check everything is running fine.
- 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.
Pros of NGINX
- High-performance http server1.4K
- Performance896
- Easy to configure728
- Open source606
- Load balancer529
- Scalability286
- Free285
- Web server222
- Simplicity173
- Easy setup134
- Content caching29
- Web Accelerator19
- Capability14
- Fast13
- Predictability11
- High-latency10
- Reverse Proxy7
- Supports http/26
- The best of them4
- Lots of Modules4
- Enterprise version4
- Great Community4
- High perfomance proxy server3
- Streaming media3
- Embedded Lua scripting3
- Reversy Proxy3
- Streaming media delivery3
- Fast and easy to set up2
- Lightweight2
- Slim2
- saltstack2
- Virtual hosting1
- Blash1
- GRPC-Web1
- Ingress controller1
- Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast1
- Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior1
- A0
Pros of Passenger
- Nginx integration43
- Great for rails36
- Fast web server21
- Free19
- Lightweight15
- Scalable14
- Rolling restarts13
- Multithreading10
- Out-of-process architecture9
- Low-bandwidth6
- Virtually infinitely scalable2
- Deployment error resistance2
- Mass deployment2
- High-latency2
- Many of its good features are only enterprise level1
- Apache integration1
- Secure1
- Asynchronous I/O1
- Multiple programming language support1
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Cons of NGINX
- Advanced features require subscription8
Cons of Passenger
- Cost (some features require paid/pro)0
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What is NGINX?
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