Apache is getting its clock cleaned…

Apache is getting its clock cleaned by nginx, though it’s still ahead in overall use. Nginx is dominating in terms of use on top sites. The charts in this post are fun. But here’s the money stat:

The Netcraft data, which looks pretty linear to our eyes, would seem to suggest that as 2016 comes to a close, NGINX will be the most popular web server in use on the top 1 million busiest sites, but the Netcraft data looks to our eye that a crossover between Apache and NGINX will happen sometime around the middle of 2017 or so.

But that is not the real metric to consider, says Garrett. “The way that I interpret this growth is that 70 percent, 80 percent, or maybe even 90 percent of new applications are being built on top of NGINX, and as traffic gradually moves from the old incumbents to the new platforms, this is driving that 50 percent figure for all of the top 10,000 and 100,000 web sites.” (Another interesting tidbit that is a kind of leading indicator. According to customer surveys, about half of the companies deploying NGINX are doing so on a public cloud.)