Overview

NGINX

Stacks114.7K

Followers61.9K

Votes5.5K

GitHub Stars28.4K

Forks7.6K

Squid

Stacks104

Followers205

Votes17

GitHub Stars2.7K

Forks594

Squid vs nginx: What are the differences?

Key Differences Between Squid and nginx

1. Squid: Squid is a caching proxy server that supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It acts as an intermediary between clients and servers, caching and delivering requested web content. Squid can be configured as a reverse proxy, intercepting and caching inbound requests from clients before forwarding them to the appropriate server.

2. nginx: nginx (pronounced "engine-x") is a high-performance web server and reverse proxy server. It is designed to efficiently handle a large number of concurrent connections and deliver static and dynamic content quickly. nginx can also act as a load balancer, distributing incoming requests to multiple backend servers for improved scalability and performance.

3. Squid: Squid primarily focuses on caching and serving static web content. It intelligently stores frequently accessed content in memory, reducing the load on backend servers and improving response times for subsequent requests. Squid can be particularly useful in scenarios where bandwidth is limited or where there is a need to reduce latency.

4. nginx: nginx is renowned for its ability to handle high volumes of concurrent connections efficiently. It is designed to handle tens of thousands of concurrent connections with minimal resource consumption. Compared to Squid, nginx is optimized for serving dynamic content and processing incoming requests quickly.

5. Squid: Squid supports various caching algorithms, allowing administrators to customize the caching behavior according to their requirements. It includes options such as LRU (Least Recently Used), LFU (Least Frequently Used), and more. These algorithms help ensure that frequently accessed content remains in cache, improving overall performance.

6. nginx: nginx provides advanced load balancing and failover mechanisms. It can distribute incoming requests across multiple backend servers based on various algorithms such as round-robin, IP hash, and more. nginx also supports health checks to automatically remove failed servers from the load balancing pool, ensuring high availability and improved resilience.

In summary, Squid focuses on caching and serving static content while nginx is a high-performance web server and reverse proxy with advanced load balancing capabilities. They differ in their primary use cases, caching algorithms, and load balancing mechanisms.

🔥 Trending in Platform as a Service on StackShare

Daytona Platform As A Service

The open source development environment manager

Try it View Docs Alternatives

Try

0

6

Advice on NGINX, Squid

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.

726k views726k

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	Squid
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.	Squid reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator. It runs on most available operating systems, including Windows and is licensed under the GNU GPL.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 28.4K	GitHub Stars 2.7K
GitHub Forks 7.6K	GitHub Forks 594
Stacks 114.7K	Stacks 104
Followers 61.9K	Followers 205
Votes 5.5K	Votes 17
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	Pros 4 Easy to config 2 Cluster 2 Very Fast 2 Web application accelerator 1 Great community

What are some alternatives to NGINX, Squid?

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.

Varnish

Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architecture.

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.

Section

Edge Compute Platform gives Dev and Ops engineers the access and control they need to run compute workloads on a distributed edge.

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.