[kyledrake]

I use nginx at Neocities to serve all our static sites, and as a proxy for our front site.

I like nginx, but it has way too much of a sacred cow treatment by the dev community. It has plenty of problems, the configuration is a psuedo-language that doesn't always make the right choices and is difficult to heavily customize, and I've gotten to it be -very- unstable under certain circumstances, including really bread-and-butter things like SSL caching. If there's a bug, you'll have a good old time debugging it's massive collection of C code. It's great, but it's not perfect.

Making nginx do custom things that you'll probably need to do in a serious environment (example: dynamically programmable SSL SNI) requires craxy mods and hacks that have only recently been made available (by third parties) and heavily reduce nginx's performance. Further, they only provide purgable proxy caching via their commercial version, which costs an exorbitant amount of money. The free purger, naturally, makes nginx lock up. I wouldn't mind chipping in a bit for nginx because I want to support their team any way, but at their current prices ($100/node/month or something like that) we simply can't afford it.

I realize this is not a popular opinion right now, but node.js is completely up to the task of running a reverse http proxy. They are basically (you likely won't notice the difference unless you're running the New York Times) competitive with nginx for performance, and as a tradeoff for an unnoticable slowdown you get a full, turing complete programming language to completely control the flow of your data. Nginx under the hood is just a reactor pattern with children that share a socket. Node.js has a cluster module that uses the exact same strategy. Mind you this is from someone that has done talks critical of reactor pattern scaling.

Also, if you have blocking I/O apps, it doesn't matter what you configure nginx to do, it's still going to lock up when someone DDoSes it with slow loris connections. Make your ruby app thread safe and use Rainbows! instead of Unicorn, or you're going to have a bad time.

[seiji]

competitive with nginx for performance, and as a tradeoff for an unnoticable slowdown you get a full, turing complete programming language to completely control the flow of your data.

It's almost like erlang and mochiweb never existed but people sure are willing to re-create it all in javascript.

JavaScript: Spending the past 20 years catching up with 1990s-level technology.

[rakoo]

> Making nginx do custom things that you'll probably need to do in a serious environment (example: dynamically programmable SSL SNI) requires craxy mods and hacks

> you get a full, turing complete programming language to completely control the flow of your data

Did you try nginx's lua support ? Because it doesn't seem to be that experimental and has its fair share of documentation already, on top of being much more performant than Javascript:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/lua/

http://openresty.org/

[youngtaff]

One of the things I don't understand about nginx is why a HTTP daemon still contains a mail proxy today!

[bhouston]

So when are you going to release "node-ginx"? :)

[kyledrake]

You're on to me. ;)

There is node-http-proxy available (https://github.com/nodejitsu/node-http-proxy), which also has some plugins available to do some of the advanced features nginx supports.

I'll likely be writing a custom proxy server tailored to our needs such that it probably won't be useful as a general purpose proxy server, but if you're looking for something, that's a start. Making it more general purpose unfortunately would require more work, and I'm pretty time stretched right now.

I'm not saying it's better than nginx, of course. I'm just saying that if you need to do some crazy programming that can't be done with nginx, you're free to use something else. Don't be fearful of treading your own path, just make sure you know well how HTTP works before doing it.

Here's a stupid example I whipped up quickly for a reverse proxy for our IPFS nodes that demonstrates how quickly you can put together a custom reverse proxy to do something weird: https://github.com/neocities/hshca-proxy/blob/master/app.js. That flaming piece of junk hasn't crashed once since I deployed it.

[tracker1]

For that matter godaddy's website builder now "publishes" to a cassandra cluster that is served via a cluster of node servers with local redis as a local in-memory cache... it works really well. The distribution model is working much better than the previous publishing via ftp to a dedicated backend linux host (apache). I haven't been there for about a year now, but I'm pretty sure a lot of those aspects have proven out.