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nginx or lighttpd? why? - Page 2
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nginx or lighttpd? why?

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Comments

  • @nabo said: And this now makes my ventilator more attractive as it is more actively developed? I doubt that.

    Well when your ventilator has 16 open bug reports and mine has 258 then its save to say that yours was better constructed than mine.

  • nabonabo Member
    edited June 2012

    @gsrdgrdghd said: Well when your ventilator has 16 open bug reports and mine has 258 then its save to say that yours was better constructed than mine.

    That is a conclusion you can not directly draw from that. It just tells you that there have been more bug reports as more bugs have been visible to somebody. It might however be the case that my ventilator, even if it just has 16 open bug reports, is constructed much worse as it has some hidden bugs that might be fatal but nobody has recognized them so far.

    What I'm trying to say is that just looking at the bug-reports list does in no way tell you if one software is better than another.

  • Considering that nginx is used by much more websites than Lighttpd probability suggests that bugs in nginx have a higher chance of being found than bugs in Lighttpd.

    Also i never sad that you can tell one webserver is better than the other from looking at the bug lists, i am just responding to this post:

    @nabo said: @beard said: nginx is actively developed and if you sign up on their mailing list, you can ask the developer and their team questions which they respond to very quickly

    So where's the difference to Lighty? :-)

  • nabonabo Member
    edited June 2012

    @gsrdgrdghd said: Considering that nginx is used by much more websites than Lighttpd probability suggests that bugs in nginx have a higher chance of being found than bugs in Lighttpd.

    Well as said, quantity is never a good indicator. I would say that the quality of the websites that are running Lighttpd of Nginx prevails in this case. The absolute numbers are uninteresting to me in that case. Nginx holds the 3rd place whereas Lighty holds the 5th. But Lighttpd is used by "Meebo, YouTube, and SourceForge. Wikimedia also runs Lighttpd servers. Three of the most famous torrent listing websites, The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt, which have more than 1,000 hits per second, also use Lighttpd." [1] "Wikipedia uses nginx as its SSL termination pr oxy." [2] Both two good indicators for quality.

    @gsrdgrdghd said: Also i never sad that you can tell one webserver is better than the other from looking at the bug lists

    Consensus. But I didn't ask for the diff I could see myself. I was merely asking for an advantage. I admit that this is not expressed quite obviously in my sentence.

  • @nabo said: I would say that the quality of the websites that are running Lighttpd of Nginx prevails in this case

    http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nginx

    WordPress.com[7][8], GitHub[9][8], SourceForge[9], ComputerBase[8], Golem.de[8], FastMail[10], Wikimedia, ImageShack und Hulu[8]

  • subigosubigo Member

    Oh look, it's this thread again. How about you just try them both and use what you like? Lighttpd and Nginx are two different things. I don't see why they are ever even compared in the first place. Building a web app and need a server backend? Go with Lighttpd. Need an Apache alternative with a bunch of walkthroughs online? Go with Nginx. Need to see Nginx fanboys come out of the closet and regurgitate the same misinformation they've been spitting for years now? Then compare Nginx to anything else in the world.

  • nginx <3

    @subigo is mad again, tch.

  • Grabs popcorn

    Thanked by 1Mon5t3r
  • Don't choke on the dic popcorn, @ElliotJ :P

    Humour aside though, @subigo has a point this time. You're better off with something that you're comfortable with than whatever uses the lesser resources. Part of my preference for Apache stems from my severe dislike of how lighty handles ACLs, for example :P

  • PhilPhil Member

    Both are very good IMHO. I guess the choice is more a matter of personal preference with configuration files syntax.

    During some testing (Debian 6, dotdeb for nginx), I noticed that:

    • lighty + PHP (fast-cgi) was a little bit faster (about 5 to 10%) than nginx + php-fpm on a LEB (1 vCore, 256 or 512 MB).
    • nginx seems to scale better with higher specs (faster than lighty when more available vCores and memory), modifying workers / max childs... on both.
    • nginx memory footprint is a little bit lower.

    About security or stability, did not notice any difference. Both provided very good uptime.

    Saying "Using nginx" also seems more "trendy", but that should not be the reason to choose nginx.

  • RophRoph Member

    I know it's wrong, but I say Nginx as "N - jinx".

    Thanked by 3DimeCadmium rm_ yomero
  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    Lighttpd gets my vote. :)

    Thanked by 1TheHackBox
  • @Roph said: I know it's wrong, but I say Nginx as "N - jinx".

    We used to refer to it internally as "Dammit, <clientname> got compromised again".

  • @Roph said: I know it's wrong, but I say Nginx as "N - jinx".

    I do too.

  • DimeCadmiumDimeCadmium Member
    edited June 2012

    @Roph said: I know it's wrong, but I say Nginx as "N - jinx".

    Same. I didn't know how it was pronounced when I first saw it. That's why I hate these "clever" names with idiotic pronunciations.

    I also pronounce GNOME like "genome"... even though I knew at the time how the word "gnome" was pronounced... shrug

  • yomeroyomero Member

    N - jinx is more cool
    genome too :P

  • @Aldryic said: We used to refer to it internally as "Dammit, <clientname> got compromised again".

    Haha, why's that? Bugs in nginx, or harder to configure securely or something?

  • @mjjohnson said: Haha, why's that? Bugs in nginx, or harder to configure securely or something?

    Nginx used to have quite a few gaping vulnerabilities. When we were still selling VMWare, maybe 4/5 of our abuse cases were the result of a VPS' nginx being compromised.

    It's been quite some time since, so it looks like they've done a decent job of patching up.

  • joepie91joepie91 Member, Patron Provider

    Reposting post from other thread:

    @joepie91 said: I have not experienced any issues with lighttpd, and I've hosted some high-traffic/high-peak sites. nginx, on the other hand, caused some ridiculous memory usage together with php-fpm (technically speaking php-fpm was eating the RAM, but as there does not seem to be another option for php + nginx...)

    lighttpd has handled 400k PHP pageloads in a day with about 512MB of RAM for me. Worked fine.

    I always find the 'active development' point to be somewhat of a weak point. If everything works and all required functionality exists, what do you need development for? Requiring development for the sake of development doesn't make any sense.

    Note that the above was written using php-fpm with a predefined amount of workers/threads/whatever they are called, which had to be set quite high to prevent HTTP 500 errors when there was a traffic peak - a lot of these workers/threads/etc would cause a lot of RAM usage. I've been told that it doesn't exist with the new on-demand implementation of php-fpm for nginx, but I haven't test this. Since lighttpd operates in on-demand mode to begin with, the problem does not exist for lighttpd.

    Thanked by 1rm_
  • nginx needs more help docs that can make or break a project.

  • vanarpvanarp Member

    @nabo said: Nginx:

    server {

    listen 80;
    server_name www.example.com;
    rewrite ^/(.*) http://example.com/$1 permanent;
    }
    Lighty:

    $HTTP["host"] =~ "^www.(.*)$" {

    url.redirect = ( "^/(.*)" => "http://%1/$1" )
    }

    Thank you very much! It looks pretty easy only.

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    This thread inspired me to review my lighttpd config which needed some cleaning up and tuning. Decided to install xcache to play around with also. :)

  • lumaluma Member

    why beat around the bush, just go with Apache damnit! or better yet IIS!

  • @luma said: why beat around the bush, just go with Apache damnit! or better yet IIS!

    Apache can thrash with fork bombin and lol at IIS.

  • TazTaz Member

    To be or not to be, That is the question.

  • Both are good software.
    See what modules / functionality you need or what system configuration you feel more comfortable.

  • @nabo that nginx example could be even simpler especially since listening to all interfaces on 80 is default. So you can remove the listen line from there.

    Also there's no reason for this:
    rewrite ^/(.*) http://example.com/$1 permanent;

    No need to capture the whole thing when you're going to pass it all, saves CPU when it's already captured into $request_uri:
    rewrite ^ http://example.com$request_uri permanent;

  • @taipres the wiki is pretty detailed, we're constantly referring people who visit the IRC channel to both http://wiki.nginx.org/ifIsEvil and http://wiki.nginx.org/pitfalls on account of all the incredibly old and incorrect blogs out there.

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