A series of new features and improvements in the latest version of nginx are promising to make the solution faster than ever. This could be good news for a large number of businesses, as the application is one of the fastest-growing web servers on the market and is now the world's third most popular web server.
Therefore, the release of version 1.4 could be very welcome, as it offers users the ability to make their websites faster and more reliable, improving the user experience.
SPDY support
Among the more notable changes is the introduction of support for the SPDY protocol. This has been designed from the ground up to transfer web content much faster than older alternatives and specialist news site Developer Tech explained this can help websites load up to 40% faster.
It could therefore be useful to many businesses and is already in use on some of the world's largest websites, with Facebook and Dropbox among those benefiting from the solution.
PageSpeed arrives Just as the 1.4 update comes out, it has also been announced by Google this month that it has launched its PageSpeed module for nginx.
This aims to allow webmasters to improve the speed of their sites without having to become experts on web performance optimisation. However, until now, it has only been available to users of the Apache web server.
Google stated that by running as a module inside nginx, the ngx_pagespeed tool rewrites web pages for faster loading. This includes compressing images, minifying CSS and JavaScript and extending cache lifetimes, as well as a range of other tweaks.
Early beta testers of the module included WordPress hosting provider ZippyKid, which reported a 75% reduction in page sizes and a 50% improvement in page rendering speeds as a result of the solutions.
The improvements released for nginx recently should make it even more attractive to web developers. Many users are already turning to the software as it offers a more streamlined solution than Apache and if benchmarks indicate improved performance as a result of the updates, this could persuade even more sites to make the switch.
