Boost Performance with Magento NGINX Web Server
NGINX is a web server designed for maximum performance and stability. It offers reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, and media streaming.
Nginx’s modular event-driven architecture offers consistent Magento performance under high loads. It easily handles requests with a low memory footprint.
NGINX supports the modern web, including WebSocket, HTTP/2, gRPC, and multiple video formats.
It is used by high‑traffic websites such as Dropbox, Netflix, and Zynga. The web server is the ideal solution for high-speed Magento hosting.
Low Memory Usage
NGINX uses an event-based architecture. It does not require new processes or threads for each request, so its memory usage is very low.
gRPC Support
NGINX offers native gRPC support. It is a ‘remote procedure call’ protocol for communication between client and server applications.
WebSocket Support
The WebSocket support protocol allows for real-time bi-directional communication between clients and servers.
FastCGI Support
FastCGI is a protocol based on the CGI or common gateway interface protocol. It improves performance by not running each request as a separate process.
Handling Static Files and Auto-indexing
NGINX offers high speed while serving concurrent static content. It handles index files and auto-indexing.
TLS/SSL with SNI
SNI extension is included in the TLS/SSL handshake process for NGINX. It ensures that the client sees the correct SSL certificate for the Magento website.
Reverse Proxy with Caching
NGINX is commonly used as a reverse proxy for HTTP. It supports modifying request headers and buffering of responses.
URL Redirection
NGINX supports URL rewriting and redirects to forward traffic from one URL to another.
IP-based and Name-based
NGINX is multipurpose and can be used as a load balancer.
NGINX Architecture
NGINX uses event-driven architecture where one master process controls many worker processes. The master maintains the workers while the workers carry out the actual processing.
Nginx is asynchronous, so each request is executed concurrently without blocking other requests. It processes thousands of requests on a single thread and operates efficiently under heavy loads.
Benefits
Lightweight Architecture
The lightweight architecture handles high and fluctuating data loads. It is consistent in RAM, and CPU usage.
Maximum Performance
NGINX offers quick processing speeds, serving a high number of concurrent connections per second. It gets up to ten times faster than an Apache Web Server.
Zero Downtime Updates
Update software versions seamlessly, with no connections refused during the upgrade process.
Event-driven Approach
NGINX stands out with its event‑driven architecture. It scales to hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections on modern hardware.
Scaling and Fault Tolerance
Scale the infrastructure and add and remove instances without end users experiencing a failure.
Advanced Media Streaming
Supports the streaming of multiple media formats like HDS, HLS, and RTMP.
FAQs
NGINX is becoming a popular web server and hosts more than 350 million websites worldwide.
Unlike Apache, it follows an event-driven approach and handles multiple requests in a single processing thread. It is 2.5 faster in fetching static content than Apache.
NGINX is widely used as a reverse proxy and load balancer to manage the high-traffic. It offers quick request interpretation, which is essential for ecommerce sites.
NGINX offers high performance and conserves server resources on the Magento store. It has quickly become the industry standard for Magento hosting.
Yes, we use PHP FPM + NGINX to host the Magento website. It comes as a configured service.
PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative to FastCGI’s implementation of PHP. It is the preferred method of processing PHP pages with NGINX.
Virtual hosting is a method for hosting multiple domain names on a single server. NGINX is designed to handle multiple domains on a single server and IP address.
It is useful when the customers have multiple sites. They don’t go through the lengthy process of setting up a new web server for each website.
Redirects inform clients that the resource they’re requesting is at a different location. For example, when the Magento website’s domain name has changed or corrected common misspellings of the domain name.
We configure the NGINX rewrites and redirects.
We use the command nginx -t to check if everything is fine with the syntax and then reload the service.
Yes, we block unwanted IPs. We write a deny rule to block a malicious IP or the Bot.
NGINX open source complies with third-party modules not built into NGINX Plus. It enables users to view or edit the source code. The open source helps maintain the packages and security fixes.
NGINX is used as a reverse proxy and load balancer to manage incoming traffic. It is placed between clients and a second web server to serve as an SSL/TLS terminator or web accelerator.
NGINX efficiently handles tasks that might slow down the web server. It includes negotiating SSL/TLS or compressing and caching content to improve performance.
Dynamic sites built using PHP deploy NGINX as a content cache and reverse proxy. It reduces the load on application servers and makes good use of the underlying hardware.