Nginx is doing well
As we announced in our change log, we exchanged the reverse proxy layer from Apache web server to Nginx. There are a lot of positive reports all over the net that favor Nginx over Apache especially for static content and high number of requests. This is due to the different architecture they are using. Apache is using a blocking IO model with threads and processes. Nginx on the other hand is using event loops and a non-blocking model.
The new servers are now running for 40 days with great success. The performance has gone up significantly, not only shown in monitoring values but also in real statistics measured by Google Labs:
Performance overview: On average, pages in your site take 0.7 seconds to load (updated on Jul 5, 2010). This is faster than 96% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (fewer than 100 data points). The chart below shows how your site's average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.
Non-blocking IO really seams to be the key to better performance. So it does not surprise that Node.js, which uses the same architecture, is currently getting so much attention. We are keeping an eye on this.
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