Preface.
It is a well-known fact that the market for web servers has a long-established leader: Apache. According to recent surveys conducted in October 2015, almost 35 percent of the World Wide Web is served by this twenty-year old open source application. However, the same reports reveal the rise of a new competitor in the past few years: Nginx, a lightweight HTTP server originating from Russia and pronounced "engine x". What has caused so many server administrators to switch to Nginx since the beginning of the 2009? Is this tiny piece of software mature enough to run a high-traffic website?
