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Light weight proxy server with best features in one - Nginx
August 06, 2019

Light weight proxy server with best features in one - Nginx

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with NGINX

Nginx is widely used in the whole organization for different applications as a front end hitting web server. It's used generally to benefit the caching mechanism and load the balance of the clustered applications and also used widely to maintain an active environment in case of any node failure or application server failure.
  • Nginx provides a very good caching mechanism as compared to other web servers. It helps to increase the performance of application when users hit the same address again and again in short period of time. This caching mechanism has many options available and it helps to configure it any way.
  • Nginx is a light weight web server which forwards the requests from the user to application server. If we host multiple sites on same Nginx server, the load of the server doesn't increase.
  • Nginx rewrite rules bring more flexibility to configure permanent or temporary redirections for some of the URLs
  • Nginx works best when we use it as front end proxy server for any application
  • Nginx is best in managing the Production and DR environments in an active mode. It is applicable for some of the applications when local file systems are shared across servers.
  • Load balancing is the thing where Nginx needs more improvement when I compare it with HAProxy. HAProxy provides more flexibility than Nginx for load balancing for clustered applications.
  • Nginx monitoring is good but not best. Teams have to improve the monitoring of Nginx where we can easily track the ddos attacks or multiple connections from one IP or multiple requests coming from one IP then they need to block it etc. i.e. Nginx must provide more flexibility in configuring more scenarios, which we do manually to improve the application performance.
  • Nginx needs improvement in the logging mechanism. Nginx must provide their own commands to get the desired output from the logs. So that instead of using unix commands and grep particular things, if Nginx provides better commands which can easily trace the logs in desired way, it will bring more flexibility to the system administrator.
  • Nginx has improved performance due to caching
  • Zero downtime in case of some of the application where we can maintain the active production and DR environments.
  • Reduced the cost of maintaining multiple web servers for multiple applications.
  • Load balancing helps at some extent in case of clustered applications.
  • Logging flexibility to configure multiple options brought more clarity in troubleshooting
Nginx's cache mechanism is better than Apache and HAProxy. Also Nginx is very light weight and works for multiple sites with much less work. i.e. As front end proxy server configuration is very easy as compared to other applications. Apache sometimes crashes and is not able to mange a high load as compared to Nginx. Apache Tomcat suits application servers but not for load balancing or cache server or front end proxy or reverse proxy also the same is true for HAProxy. HAProxy's load balancing feature is really good but comparing other features, Nginx is the best.
Overall good but not the best. Support for Nginx is better but there is need of some improvement in response time; for new customers response time is not good enough. There is a high scope to improve the support in case of response time to new customers who are willing to setup a meeting with the vendor for more clarifications and to know more about features.
Nginx is best to use as front end proxy for any application server. Nginx's cache mechanism is one of the best as compared to other web servers. Nginx is really a light weight webserver and it provides more flexibility in case of load balancing in clustered application. Configuration of Nginx is very easy as compared to other web servers. Nginx uses fewer resources of hosted server.

Using NGINX

Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application. Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective. Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.