New Version of NGINX Open Source Web Server Available
Wednesday Apr 25th 2012 by Vangie Beal
Highlights of NGINX version 1.2.0 include flexible configuration options for proxy redirects, improved load balancing and extended DNS resolver configuration.
The developers of the open source NGINX ("engine x") Web server have announced version 1.2.0 is now available for download. Deeming it a milestone release, Nginx Inc. said this version is a culmination of NGINX's annual development and extensive quality assurance cycle, led by the core engineering team and by enthusiastic user community contributions.
According to Nginx, its Web server currently holds the position of being the second most popular choice for active sites on the Internet – having grown its market share of enabled domains 200 percent since April 2011, serving over 25 percent of the top 1,000 websites. The company also reports that firms such as Pinterest, Instagram, CloudFlare, WordPress, GitHub, Zynga, Eventbrite, RightScale, Engine Yard, and others use NGINX to build online services.
"This recent release concludes a significant phase of development. We have made tremendous progress, streamlined our development efforts as a company, and are excited to see a quickly growing number of companies using NGINX as a modern and extremely cost-effective solution for application routing and acceleration," said Igor Sysoev, the author of NGINX Web server and the founder of Nginx, Inc. "We will continue to work on a variety of extensions based on feedback from our extraordinary user community."
A New Focus on Mainstream Acceptance
Underscoring its expanding acceptance as a mainstream web infrastructure software, the latest version reflects NGINX's focus on performance, scalability, reliability and security.
Nginx Inc. describes NGINX as a high-performance, high-concurrency, edge Web server excelling at Layer 7 acceleration and security tasks — concurrency offloading with reverse proxying, load balancing and caching; application request routing; SSL termination; bandwidth, connection and request throttling; content filtering and compression; offloading different types of static content; and more.
"In addition to reinforcing software development and quality control processes, the company has launched an online code browser and a bug-tracking system for the users of NGINX, and has devoted increased resources to the ongoing improvement of the documentation," said Nginx.
NGINX Version 1.2.0 Features
NGINX 1.2.0 is the latest production-quality release of the stable branch, incorporating over 40 new features and more than 100 bug fixes since April 2011. Principal highlights of version 1.2.0 include:
HTTP Proxy:
Re-use of keepalive connections to upstream servers
Consolidation of multiple simultaneous requests to upstream servers ("cache locks")
Flexible configuration options for proxy redirects, header and cookie manipulation
Improved load balancing with synchronous health checks
Extended DNS resolver configuration
HTTP byte-range limits
Extended configuration for connection and request throttling
Additional filesystem security controls
PCRE JIT optimized regular expressions
Reduced memory consumption with long-lived and TLS/SSL connections
Improved handling of asynchronous disk and network I/O
Optimized management of cache metadata
NGINX can be freely downloaded from the NGINX community website.
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