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The main function of a web server is to serve content from your site as efficiently as possible without overwhelming it with traffic or slowing down its load times. A good way to think about this would be like water pressure; if you have too much pressure coming into your house from your plumbing system, then nothing will work properly at all! Similarly, if there aren't enough resources available for the web server itself when it's working hard trying to send data back out through its pipes then things will start getting messy real fast!
The three most popular types of servers used today include: Mongrels (written in Ruby), Apache (written mostly in C/C++) and Nginx (written entirely in C).nd which one should you pick? Let's find out!
A web server is the part of a computer system that responds to requests from clients (e.g., Web browsers) for documents and files stored in the server's file system. The term can also refer to just the software that makes this possible, or more generally to any kind of server on any kind of computer on which an application runs.
The main function of a web server is to serve content from your site as efficiently as possible without overwhelming it with traffic or slowing down its load times. A good way to think about this would be like water pressure; if you have too much pressure coming into your house from your plumbing system, then nothing will work properly at all! Similarly, if there aren't enough resources available for the web server itself when it's working hard trying to send data back out through its pipes then things will start getting messy real fast!
The three most popular types of servers used today include Mongrels (written in Ruby), Apache (written mostly in C/C++) and Nginx (written entirely in C).
They all have a long history that goes back to the early days of the Internet and they have proven their reliability over time.All three of the servers are open source, which means that you can modify the code yourself, or even use it for free. This also means that any bugs found in the software will be fixed by a community of developers who share their work as well. They're all cross-platform, meaning that they run on multiple operating systems (Windows and Linux, for example).
Mongrel is a web server for Ruby. It's fast, reliable, and scalable. Mongrel is not that great choice for web applications that are CPU-intensive because ruby is not a very fast language.
Mongrel implements a single-process model where requests are handled by one thread per connection (or less if you configure it to do so). This results in fast response times since there's no need to wait for I/O operations before returning control back to the user after every request.
Apache is the most popular web server in the world and for good reason. It's free, open source and cross-platform (meaning it can run on a wide variety of operating systems). Apache was also written in C++ which makes it incredibly fast.
Apache also has a very large community behind it with many modules available that allow you to extend its functionality beyond what's natively supported by default. The plugin system allows you to add anything from additional security modules right through to complex applications like memcached or redis caching servers.
The only downside of Apache is that it requires some technical knowledge if you want complete control over how your website works but once you have this then there are few limits on what you can achieve with this software!
Nginx is a popular open source web server designed to handle high concurrency, and it also has an event-driven architecture.
Nginx uses asynchronous I/O for handling requests, which helps it achieve higher performance than other web servers. This is because Nginx doesn't have to wait for responses from upstream servers in order to send data back to the client; instead, Nginx sends data using multiple threads of execution (one per connection). It also has a modular design that allows you to include only some parts of the application stack on your server if you don't need them all. The most common feature sets include:
Web server (HTTP/1.1)
Reverse proxy/load balancer (TCP)
If you have a website, it needs a web server.
What are the pros and cons of each?
Mongrel is good for small sites that are not expected to grow.
Nginx is good for large sites with many concurrent users.
Apache handles traffic spikes well because it can spawn new processes on demand and handle them in parallel with existing processes.
What do they have in common? They all use threads to handle requests (instead of having just one process doing everything). This means that multiple requests can be handled by the same process simultaneously; if one request takes a long time, other requests don't have to wait for their turn.
So, you're considering a web server. The good news is that you have three great options to choose from. We've reviewed the pros and cons of each in this blog post. If you have any additional questions after reading this blog post, please let us know in the comments section below or reach out to us via our contact form.