Is Nginx on Window 7 64bit production ready / worthy?

I am considering:
- putting Nginx in front of Apache
- let Nginx handle SSL
- let Nginx handle the small amount of static content
- let Nginx forward dynamic requests to Apache (running Oracle mod_plsql)

My main goal is to get SSL out Apache as I don’t like how Oracle handles SSL in their Apache environment as it makes Oracle upgrades more complicated and I believe SSL processing can be faster.

My only experience with Nginx is a few hours of reading. It sounds like Nginx on Linux/BSD is the bomb. Any thoughts with 64bit Windows?

Nginx in general is much faster and more stable than Apache, and much easier to configure. It can also handle dynamic content no problem if you have the needed backends installed (such as php-fpm to link Nginx to PHP). I've been using Nginx+PHP for some time now with minimal problems on Linux, and I've had way fewer problems than with Apache (mostly relating to speed).

As for Windows, I've heard that Windows as a server can be a nightmare compared to Linux (haven't talked to any BSD users). I've also heard quite a lot over the years that Windows is also very insecure compared to Open Source. And from personal experience, it's just plain slow, and it just keeps getting slower even with antivirus/antispyware/defragging.

If you absolutely must have Windows for your server, you could run a Virtual Machine for your important stuff, and have that safe in case Windows crashes (just copy the Virtual Machine to another computer). Oracle has their VirtualBox, which you can use for free to keep Windows running while simultaneously using Linux, BSD, etc. If you need help setting that up, or if you're willing to switch to Linux (perhaps as a dual boot, so you can keep Windows in case you don't like Linux), I can provide a bit of help. I can't help with anything Windows-specific, but I am well-acquainted with Linux, and I have used VirtualBox.

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Piki

You could try this one for Windows: http://winginx.com

Thanks for your help. For this particular project, I absolutely 100% refuse to run type of virtualization software as I found (mainly testing VMware ESXi) it hurts performance. Ever benchmark a server and then the benchmark the same server under virtualization? I spend too much time tuning sql, databases, javascript ect… to run on a virtual host.

I’m not sure if I want to move to a Linux, even though it’s great and Oracle runs great on Linux. Also I’m not sure how much performance gain I’ll have.

This particular application is blazing fast. There are only has around 100-200 open web sessions. I actually have no middleware such as PHP as the web server communicates directly to the Oracle database through Apache/mod_plsql. And by not having a middleware, this actually increases performance as every page is dynamic.

If Nginx had something similar to Apache/Oracle’s mod_plsql, which allows Nginx to ask the database for the html page text, similar to Apache mod_plsql, I would switch to Linux/Nginx today. I can see someday this happening….

In the meantime, I’ll wait and see if Nginx for windows 64 improves. I did find a reverse proxy software which does ssl offloading, web cache, gzip and more which I’ve been trying. It’s working pretty well.