Understanding Nginx Internal Architecture and Its High-Performance Design

Nginx server is widely recognized for its high concurrency, high performance, and high efficiency, ranking second among web server deployments and being extensively used for reverse proxy and load balancing.

The article explains that Nginx achieves these goals through its unique internal architecture, illustrated by the diagram below.

Key points include:

1) When Nginx starts, it creates two types of processes: a master process and one (on Windows) or multiple worker processes. The master does not handle network requests; it schedules workers, loads configuration, starts workers, and performs graceful upgrades, so at least two Nginx processes are visible.

2) The worker processes handle actual network requests and responses; on Unix‑like systems multiple workers can be configured, each capable of handling thousands of concurrent connections.

3) Modular design: each worker consists of core and functional modules. The core maintains a run‑loop and executes different stages such as network read/write, storage access, content transfer, filtering, and upstream proxying. This modular code allows selective compilation of required features.

4) Event‑driven, asynchronous, and non‑blocking mechanisms are the key factors for Nginx’s high concurrency and performance, leveraging OS kernel event notification and I/O enhancements like kqueue, epoll, and event ports.

5) Proxy design is deeply embedded in Nginx; whether handling HTTP, FastCGI, memcached, Redis, or other protocols, it operates as a high‑performance proxy server.

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