Why Use Nginx?
There have been a couple benchmarks done that show Nginx to edge out other lightweight webservers and proxies, and to stomp out the not-so lightweight ones.
Some people say those benchmarks weren't valid because the competition wasn't tuned this way or that, etc. I tend to agree that benchmarks only tell part of the story and that there's little you can do to truly remove bias from them anyway (has anyone ever seen a benchmark that everyone agreed was fair? Me either).
Anyway, rather than post links to benchmarks for people to argue over (you can use Google to find them yourself if you like), instead, what follows is quotes from people using Nginx in the real world, under real load, serving real applications and websites.
Please feel free to add your own testimonial, but see the note at the bottom of this page before you do.
Nginx as a High-Performance Reverse Proxy Under the same kind of load, Apache falls over (after using 1000 or so processes and god knows how much RAM), Pound falls over (too many threads, and using 400MB+ of RAM for all the thread stacks), and Lighty leaks more than 20MB per hour (and uses more CPU, but not significantly more).
I currently have Nginx doing reverse proxy of over tens of millions of HTTP requests per day (thats a few hundred per second) on a single server. At peak load it uses about 15MB RAM and 10% CPU on my particular configuration (FreeBSD 6).
Nginx as High-Performance Webserver
[We] are using nginx as a primary software for free hosting platforms. I have developed specific modules for banner inserting and stats calculation in nginx and now our central server can handle about 150-200Mbit/s of highly fragmented http-traffic (all files are small). I think, this is really good result bacause with any possible tunnings of Apache on the same servers we were not able to handle even 60-80Mbit/s. -- Alexey Kovyrin
Nginx as a High-Performance IMAP/POP3 proxy and HTTP proxy
A while back, we changed our frontend IMAP/POP proxy from perdition to nginx... [and] we’ve now switched over to using nginx for our frontend web proxy as well... The net result of all this is that each frontend proxy server currently maintains over 10,000 simultaneous IMAP, POP, Web & SMTP connections (including many SSL ones) using only about 10% of the available CPU on 3.20GHz Netburst Xeon based CPUs. -- FastMail.fm blog
Nginx as a flexible caching solution
We recently switched over our static content webserver over to Nginx, easily the most impressive webserver I’ve seen in years. We’re running it on a machine with 8Gb of memory (along with some other stuff), but the nginx process is only using a ridiculously small 1.4Mb. In other words, it barely registers in any measurable way. -- Philip Jacob
Note:
Please feel free to add your own testimonial, but we prefer that it refer to a high traffic site or a site that Nginx somehow provided a unique solution for. Also, if numbers (server utilization, network throughput, simultaneous connections, etc) and/or an actual link to the site being discussed can be provided it makes it much more relevant for people curious about Nginx.