NGINX announces latest version of its acclaimed web server

SAN FRANCISCO, USA & MOSCOW, RUSSIA: Open source developer Nginx Inc. announced the cutting-edge version of its widely deployed web server is now available for download. This milestone release version 1.2.0 is a culmination of NGINX’s annual development and extensive quality assurance cycle, led by the core engineering team and by enthusiastic user community. NGINX 1.2.0 is the latest production-quality release of the stable branch, incorporating over 40 new features and over 100 bugfixes introduced since April 2011.

“This recent release concludes a significant phase of development. We have made tremendous progress, streamlined our development efforts as a company, and are excited to see a quickly growing number of companies using NGINX as a modern and extremely cost-effective solution for application routing and acceleration,” said Igor Sysoev, the author of NGINX web server and the founder of Nginx. “We will continue to work on a variety of extensions based on feedback from our extraordinary user community.”

The second most popular web server for active sites on the Internet, NGINX (“engine x”) has grown its market share of enabled domains 200% since April 2011. Successful companies such as Pinterest, Instagram, CloudFlare, Airbnb, WordPress, GitHub, SoundCloud, Zynga, Eventbrite, OMGPOP, ModCloth, Heroku, RightScale, Engine Yard, and many others, rely on NGINX to build highly valued online services.

Underscoring its expanding acceptance as a mainstream web infrastructure software, the latest version 1.2.0 reflects NGINX’s focus on performance, scalability, reliability and security. In addition to reinforcing software development and quality control processes, the company has launched an online code browser and a bug-tracking system for the users of NGINX, and has devoted increased resources to the ongoing improvement of the documentation.

Main highlights of version 1.2.0 include:
- HTTP Proxy
• Re-use of keepalive connections to upstream servers.
• Consolidation of multiple simultaneous requests to upstream servers (“cache locks”).
• Flexible configuration options for proxy redirects, header and cookie manipulation.
• Improved load balancing with synchronous healthchecks.
• Extended DNS resolver configuration.
- Security
• HTTP byte-range limits.
• Extended configuration for connection and request throttling.
• Additional filesystem security controls.
- Performance
• PCRE JIT optimized regular expressions.
• Reduced memory consumption with long-lived and TLS/SSL connections.
• Improved handling of asynchronous disk and network I/O.
• Optimized management of cache metadata.