Nginx Releases New Stable Branch with Noticeable Improvements
After 11 months of development, Nginx has announced the release of a new stable branch for its high-performance HTTP server and multi-percotcock server. The new branch, called Nginx 1.24.0, includes all the changes that have been accumulated in the main branch, 1.23.X. Going forward, all changes in the stable branch 1.24 will be focused on the elimination of serious errors and vulnerabilities. The development of new capabilities will continue in the main Nginx 1.25 branch that will be formed soon. For regular users who don’t need to ensure compatibility with third-party modules, using the main branch is recommended. The releases of the commercial product Nginx Plus are formed on the basis of this branch once every three months.
According to a report by Netcraft, as of March 2023, Nginx is used on 18.94% of all active sites, representing a decline from 20.08% a year ago and 20.15% two years ago. However, it still holds the second place in popularity in this category after Apache, which presently holds 20.52% of the market share. Among all Nginx sites, it maintains leadership, holding 25.94%, while Apache’s share corresponds to 20.58% and Cloudflare has captured 10.17%. Among the top million most visited sites in the world, Cloudflare is the leader with a share of 21.62%, while Nginx and Apache’s share are almost equal at 21.37% and 21.18%, respectively.
It is reported that approximately 289 million sites operate under the control of Nginx, which is a decline from 361 million a year ago. In Russia, Nginx holds the top position, being used on 81.3% of the most visited websites, up from 79.8% a year ago.
The main branch 1.23.x includes several noticeable improvements, such as the inclusion of the default TLSV1.3 protocol, automatic rotation of encryption keys, optimization of memory consumption, and support of variables.
One of the most significant changes is the inclusion of the default TLSV1.3 protocol, which improves security and experience for clients. Another important improvement is the automatic rotation of encryption keys, which is used when utilizing the separate memory in the directive SSL_SESSION_CACHE. The optimization of memory consumption in configurations with proxying SSL also ensures better performance. The newest support for variables