nginx: A Practical Guide to High Performance

Get started with nginx ("engine x"), the high-performance HTTP web server that has quickly and quietly gained popularity among the most highly visited websites on the Internet. With this practical guide, Twitpic cofounder Steve Corona teaches nginx basics through real-world applications, use cases, and lessons he learned when scaling this server to handle 10,000 Twitpic requests per second.

Software developers and systems engineers alike will not only learn the tools necessary to configure and deploy nginx, but will also become familiar with nginx's ability to route HTTP traffic, serve as a proxy to Rails or PHP applications, and act as a software load balancer.


Learn scaling and tuning topics not available in other documentation
Gain a deep understanding of configuration--why certain settings work in particular cases
Distribute web traffic across multiple application servers through load balancing
Serve dynamic web applications in Ruby, PHP, Node, and Python through reverse proxy
Understand why 21% of the top one million busiest websites on the Internet use nginx rather than Apache