Nginx
/ˈɛn.dʒɪn.ɛks/ · Noun · Development · Origin: 2004
Definitions
Nginx (pronounced 'engine-x') is a high-performance web server, reverse proxy, and load balancer created by Igor Sysoev in 2004 to solve the C10K problem of handling ten thousand concurrent connections efficiently. Unlike Apache's process-per-connection model, Nginx uses an asynchronous, event-driven architecture that handles many connections within a small number of worker processes, resulting in low memory usage and high throughput. Nginx is commonly used to serve static files, terminate TLS connections, proxy requests to application servers (Node.js, Python, Ruby), cache responses, and distribute traffic across backend servers. Its configuration syntax is concise and file-based, using directives organized into contexts like http, server, and location blocks. Nginx supports HTTP/2, gRPC proxying, WebSocket proxying, rate limiting, and access control. It powers a large share of the world's websites and is often the first point of contact for incoming traffic in production architectures. Nginx is available as open-source software and as a commercial product called Nginx Plus with additional features like active health checks and a dashboard.
In plain English: One of the most popular web servers in the world — the software that serves web pages to your browser for millions of websites.
Origin Story
A Russian engineer's answer to the C10K problem
**Nginx** (pronounced "engine-x") was created by **Igor Sysoev**, a Russian system administrator, starting in 2002. He was working at Rambler, one of Russia's largest internet portals, and needed a web server that could handle the **C10K problem** — serving 10,000 concurrent connections on a single server, which Apache httpd struggled with at the time.
Apache used a process-per-connection model (or thread-per-connection): each connected client got its own process, consuming significant memory. Sysoev designed Nginx with an **event-driven, asynchronous architecture** that could handle thousands of connections with a handful of worker processes. It was publicly released in 2004.
Nginx grew steadily and by 2019 overtook Apache as the world's most-used web server. The name has no official meaning beyond sounding like "engine" — Sysoev has said it's simply a concise, pronounceable name. In 2019, F5 Networks acquired Nginx Inc. for $670 million. Sysoev left the company in 2022.
Coined by: Igor Sysoev
Context: Rambler (Russia), 2002; public release 2004
Fun fact: In 2019, Russian police raided the Nginx Moscow office as part of a copyright dispute with Rambler, who claimed ownership of the code since Sysoev developed it while employed there. The case was eventually dropped, but it highlighted the legal complexities of open-source projects started at employers.