Why Nginx Dominates as the World’s Most Popular Web Server

Why Nginx Became the Leading Web Server

Before Nginx, Apache dominated the web‑server market, but Nginx’s performance‑oriented architecture pushed Apache to second place.

Key Advantages

High efficiency , stability , and a mature codebase make Nginx the most popular choice.

Adoption in China

Major internet companies such as Baidu, JD.com, Tencent, NetEase, and Taobao rely on Nginx for their services.

Core Capabilities

Nginx provides web serving, load balancing (reverse proxy), and web caching.

Basic Knowledge

Nginx is an open‑source, high‑performance HTTP server, reverse proxy, mail proxy, and TCP/UDP proxy.

It uses a multi‑process model consisting of a master process and multiple worker processes.

Master Process Functions

Read and validate configuration files

Create, bind, and close socket connections

Manage worker processes according to configuration

Accept commands such as restart, upgrade, or shutdown

Perform graceful upgrades without service interruption

Open log files and obtain file descriptors

Handle rollback on upgrade failure

Compile and execute Perl scripts

Worker Process Functions

Accept and process client requests

Dispatch requests to various functional modules

Perform I/O operations to obtain response data

Communicate with backend servers and receive results

Cache data and query cache indexes

Send responses back to clients

Receive commands from the master process (restart, upgrade, exit)

Core Configuration Details

Example of creating a mobile web site and using the location directive.

Four‑layer access control is implemented via the ngx_http_access_module, allowing IP‑based restrictions.

File existence checking can be performed with the if (-f $request_filename) directive.

Advanced Configuration

Reverse proxy configuration forwards external requests to internal web servers and returns the data to users.

Logical call relationships and production‑environment deployment structures are illustrated with diagrams.