Nginx 1.4 Lights Up Google’s SPDY and PageSpeed!

Nginx, the second most popular web server, venerated for its speed and exceptional performance particularly with static content, reverse proxies and VPS setups among other purposes (a server we might want to consider actually), is now a viable option for you to choose if the deal breaker keeping you back was a lack of either Google’s PageSpeed or SPDY or both.

No idea what this is, and how does this apply to you? Well, this actually is relevant to your interests anyway: Google has been trying aggressively for years to speed up the web. They cranked out better math than anything else out there by far, but the hard part keeping that better math away from all of us is a reluctance on the part of the major players to adopt the free technology, simply because it hasn’t been adopted widely enough yet.

But this Nginx server, whose users I’d wager are likely to embrace the likes of SPDY and everything that comes with PageSpeed (including auto-WebP transitioning) than Apache users and of course IIS users. It’s one big crack in the that catch 22 dam. These headlines leave Microsoft’s IIS in the old and slow club. Microsoft has no advantage to remain there that I can think of (unless they actually want a lower share on the pie charts), certainly not when the two biggest websites in the world (Facebook, Google) are using SPDY and many more, including us hopefully soon. And so perhaps Microsoft will get with the SPDY program both with IIS and IE too, which they’re rumored to be doing, resulting in faster websites and a more open mind for everyone to embrace improved technology.

This is good news not just to Nginx users, and users of sites that use Nginx (who use SPDY-supporting browsers), but to the web at large; so high five and a pat on the ass to everyone who’s involved with this progress.

Doug Simmons