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Reasons to use Nginx

Noted by on his .

I generally recommend Caddy over Nginx, but Nginx does still have certain advantages:

  • Nginx supports OpenSSL commands that enable features like TLS record padding.

  • Performance: better latency and scalability to more connections. Not everyone uses a CDN for static/cached content

  • Kernel-accelerated TLS offload on Linux and FreeBSD

  • Many existing modules provide unique functionality. The many modules for live video streaming and image processing are good examples.

  • An ecosystem of patches with features like HPACK static dictionaries, dynamic TLS record sizing, etce

…has terrible language integration.

Generally, “language integration” isn’t really a use-case for vanilla Nginx; it’s a use-case for Nginx Unit, an Nginx language-specific module, or OpenResty. I personally prefer the reverse-proxy route since it lets me use whatever language I want regardless of server support: Go, Rust, Python, C, etc.

If none of these are that important then I absolutely would not recommend Nginx; Caddy would be the better tool.

People aren’t writing internet scale software in lua for a reason.

I’d include Itch.io, much of Taobao, and some of the most popular API gateways (including Kong) in the category of “Internet-scale software written by ‘people’”.