Nginx (pronounced “engine X”) is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy, and HTTP cache. The software was created by Igor Sysoev and publicly released in 2004. It is famous for its high concurrency, performance, and low memory usage — particularly in front of slower upstream servers.
Today, Nginx serves or proxies a significant percentage of the busiest sites on the internet, and its event-driven, asynchronous architecture inspired a generation of high-performance web servers.
High-performance HTTP server, reverse proxy, load balancer. Drives a massive share of the busiest sites.
✨ Features
Asynchronous, non-blocking architecture. Handles tens of thousands of connections per worker.
Forward traffic to upstream servers with health checks, retries, and connection pooling.
Round-robin, least-connections, IP-hash, weighted balancing across upstreams.
Disk-based caching for upstream responses. Drastically reduce origin load for static-ish content.
Modern protocol support. OCSP stapling, session resumption, certificate hot-reload.
