I switched over to nginx a couple weeks ago, and so far I say its freaking awesome. I have used lighttpd and Cherokee, and even looked at Apache, but none had everything I really needed.
lighttpd: This was the first web daemon I used, and it was alright, but as site load grew and no budget available for new servers came, I needed something better. The problem with lighty was the fact it would service only a few requests, keeping new ones on hold until the older ones finished up. This sometimes made even static images timeout. Lighty served my product for nearly 4 years just by itself.
Cherokee: Second daemon I used, but it couldn't do the no-www redirect that I needed, nor could it handle FastCGI properly. Every time I tried to have Cherokee connect to my FastCGI backend, the memory usage for php-cgi shot through the roof and run out of memory and swap. The people in #cherokee (FreeNode) told me it was a PHP issue, while everyone else told me what I already knew - it was a Cherokee issue. This memory issue never happened while lighty interfaced with FastCGI, so I had Cherokee proxy its PHP requests through lighty for FastCGI handling, but this eventually proved to be too laggy under load, again lighty's request holding behavior was less than desirable. Cherokee also had a number of other network-related bugs (like failing to release closed connections) that the developer refused to fix, I had to set up a crond task to restart Cherokee every hour so my service was still usable. That's unacceptable.
Apache20: I was setting Apache20 up for usage, when I noticed one little line near the end of the FastCGI documentation: "You can not load balance between multiple php backend." That alone makes Apache20 with mod_fastcgi absolutely useless. Seems to me it was developed specifically as a novelty item to allow Apache20 advocates to say "yes, we have FastCGI support".
Then came nginx. nginx was everything I needed - speed and proper FastCGI usage. Turns out its even faster than Cherokee for static files, and it handles FastCGI the same way Cherokee did - no waiting, just handling, yet unlike Cherokee, it handles FastCGI properly, like lighty did. I no longer have to run 2 web daemons, I just run nginx now. nginx is so fast, I was able to remove the replacement of my web server from the acquisition list. Looks like I'm going to be racking a Pentium 3 thanks to nginx.
A bit about me: I love kitties and I'm a very geeky web developer. I even admin my own servers.
~Jessica
Owner, Varus Online
Rawr!
