We have an audio recording of this presentation.

This month, Konstantin Antselovich will give an overview of the Nginx (pronounced engine-x) web server software. Konstantin last spoke to us in Orange County last March when he gave an excellent presentation on PostgreSQL database replication.

The Nginx web server was developed in Russia, originally for the internal needs of the large Russian search/portal site rambler.ru.

Konstantin will focus on "what's wrong with Apache", and explain to us why we should bother with alternative web servers. He will give an example of a situation where you need something like Nginx to overcome performance issues with Apache or other web servers.

Konstantin will describe the archtecture of the Nginx software, with a particular focus on what makes Nginx so fast. He will describe the event-based state machine model and how that relates to the Nginx design.

He will also show us some examples of the Nginx configuration, including configuring Nginx for basic functionality, as a web server, web server with virtual hosting, web server+mod_rewrite, and web server + reverse proxy load balancer. Konstantin will also discuss the internal perl interpreter feature of Nginx.

Finally, we will have a demo of Nginx running as a load balancer, and passing requests to 2 app servers. This demo will cover what happens when one of the app servers dies or becomes overloaded in the Nginx load balanced environment.

Konstantin is the IT Director for SmartLink.