Nginx Features, Advantages, Use Cases, and Installation Guide

Nginx itself is a static web server software that excels at serving small static files with high concurrency while consuming minimal resources; it can handle 30,000 concurrent connections with just 10 threads and 150 MB of memory.

Major functions of Nginx include:

WWW web service (HTTP on port 80)

Load balancing (reverse proxy)

Web cache

Content Delivery Network (CDN) capabilities, widely used by large companies for local caching and near‑site access.

Key advantages of Nginx are:

High concurrency for static small files.

Low resource consumption.

Rich feature set (web cache, proxy), though each individual feature is not the strongest.

Support for the epoll model, enabling high‑concurrency handling.

Distinct behavior when combined with dynamic services compared to Apache.

Ability to limit IP bandwidth and connection counts.

Simple and flexible configuration.

Typical application scenarios for Nginx:

Static file server (images, videos, HTML, CSS, FLV, etc.), similar to Lighttpd.

Dynamic services using FastCGI, e.g., running PHP.

Reverse proxy and load balancing for traffic below 2 million PV, often replacing dedicated hardware proxies like HAProxy, F5, or A10.

Cache service, comparable to Squid.

Installation steps:

Prepare the environment:

Wget -o /etc/yum.repo.d/CentOS-Base.repo http://mirrors.aliyun.com/repo/Centos-7.repo

Install PCRE:

yum -y install pcre pcre-devel

cd /pcre8.3

./configure

make && make install

Install OpenSSL: yum -y install openssl openssl-devel Begin Nginx installation:

tar -xf nginx-1.6.2.tar.gz

cd /nginx-1.6.2

useradd nginx -s /sbin/nologin -M

./configure --user=nginx --group=nginx --prefix=/application/nginx1.6.2 --with-http_stub_status_module --with-http_ssl_module

make && make install

echo $?

cd ../

ln -s /application/nginx1.6.2/ /application/nginx

Start Nginx:

/application/nginx/sbin/nginx -t

netstat -lntup | grep nginx

lsof -i:80

curl 10.0.0.1