What is the Nginx architecture?
Nginx uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model with a master process and worker processes. The master reads config and manages workers. Each worker (one per CPU core) can handle thousands of concurrent connections simultaneously with minimal memory.
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More FAQs in What Is Nginx and Why Use It with Node.js Web Server and Reverse Proxy Guide
Nginx is a web server and reverse proxy. It serves static files, handles SSL/TLS termination, load balances across multiple app instances, compresses responses, caches content, rate limits requests, and proxies WebSocket connections. It is the most popular web server on the internet.
Nginx handles port management (80/443 while Node uses 3000), SSL termination (Nginx handles HTTPS, Node handles HTTP), static file serving (Nginx is faster), load balancing, gzip compression, caching, rate limiting, and WebSocket proxying for Socket.io.
Nginx is much faster for static files because it's written in C with an event-driven model, using ~2 KB memory per connection. Node.js uses ~1 MB per connection and is single-threaded, making it inefficient for static file serving.
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