OJ’s rants What would OJ do?

Now Running Nginx

For the last couple of years, the server which has powered this site (and a few other sites) has been running the free version of Litespeed web server. After feeling the resource burden of Apache, Litespeed was a breath of fresh air! The fact that the "full" version wasn't free didn't bother me, I was happy to stick with the standard edition as it seemed more than capable of handling the meagre traffic that this site generates.

After a year or so of serving up content, it managed to handle a couple of Reddit submissions without much of a bother! I was suitably impressed.

But there comes a time when you can't help but wonder what else is out there. For me, that time came a little while ago when I boosted the number of plug-ins that I use on this site. Litespeed took longer to serve pages up and I couldn't help but notice it. I'm certainly not blaming Litespeed, because the obvious solution is to remove the plug-ins! But I didn't want to do that as those plug-ins provide features for this site that I don't want to lose. So my quest to find another web server began.

Then recently I started researching ideas for developing software in Erlang. I've been reading up on the language for quite a while and I'm getting to the point where I intend to build something. My first effort is going to be a web application that uses Mochiweb, Webmachine and CouchDB. I know that at some point I'm going to want to have this thing run on the web so that other people can play with it and that would mean that I would have to have a web server available that could also route requests to my Erlang server. Of course, I want it to be quick.

So after a bit of deliberation and research, I followed the footsteps of some big players and ended up installing Nginx (which I believe is pronounced "Engine-X"). I kid you not, this thing is amazing! I'm not going to give a full review of it here because I haven't used it enough to know how good it is. But the speed-up for this site in particular is obvious (at least for me).

My mate Dan's site absolutely flies!

On the whole, Nginx gets a huge thumbs up from me thus far. If you're looking for a speedy web server that can do reverse proxying, dish up static content like a maniac and handle forwarding of requests to a variety of other servers then you should seriously consider taking a look at Nginx.

Thank you, Igor!