Well, you can configure how many processes nginx runs with at startup, but otherwise yes it is an event loop based system. Lua is just a module like anything else in Nginx, and uses the Nginx event loop.
> Unlike Apache's mod_lua and Lighttpd's mod_magnet, Lua code written atop this module can be 100% non-blocking on network traffic as long as you use the ngx.location.capture or ngx.location.capture_multi interfaces to let the nginx core do all your requests to mysql, postgresql, memcached, redis, upstream http web services, and etc etc etc (see HttpDrizzleModule, ngx_postgres, HttpMemcModule, HttpRedis2Module and HttpProxyModule modules for details).
Is that talk-via-nginx-commands thing cumbersome in practice?
From the nginx wiki:
> Unlike Apache's mod_lua and Lighttpd's mod_magnet, Lua code written atop this module can be 100% non-blocking on network traffic as long as you use the ngx.location.capture or ngx.location.capture_multi interfaces to let the nginx core do all your requests to mysql, postgresql, memcached, redis, upstream http web services, and etc etc etc (see HttpDrizzleModule, ngx_postgres, HttpMemcModule, HttpRedis2Module and HttpProxyModule modules for details).
Is that talk-via-nginx-commands thing cumbersome in practice?