After a year of development, a new stable branch of a high-performance HTTP server and multi-protocol proxy server nginx 1.30.0 has been published, incorporating the accumulated changes in the main branch 1.29.x. Moving forward, all changes in the stable branch 1.30 will focus on addressing critical errors and vulnerabilities. The main branch of nginx 1.31 will soon be formed to continue the development of new features. For regular users who do not need to ensure compatibility with third-party modules, it is recommended to use the main branch as the basis for the releases of the commercial product Nginx Plus every three months. The nginx code is written in C and distributed under the BSD license.
According to a February report by Netcraft, approximately 321 million websites are currently running nginx, marking an increase from 245 million a year ago, 243 million two years ago, and 289 million three years ago. Nginx is utilized on 16.08% of all active sites, ranking second in popularity in this category. Apache holds a 13.27% share, Cloudflare at 20.62%, and Google at 10.65%.
When considering all sites, nginx maintains a market share of 22.65%, while Apache follows with 12.19%, Cloudflare at 15.27%, and OpenResty (a platform based on nginx and LuaJIT) at 8.01%.
Among the million most visited sites globally, nginx holds the second position with a share of 19.85%, following Cloudflare at 26.84% and Apache httpd at 15.84%.
According to data from W3Techs, nginx is used on 32.8% of the million most visited sites, with Apache experiencing a decrease in share over the year. The share of Microsoft IIS and Caddy also decreased, while Node.js and LiteSpeed’s shares increased.
Several notable improvements were incorporated during the development of the main branch 1.29.x.