A lot of your post is not wrong, but that statistic is just not right at all. Less that half of the time we see apache instances behind NGINX, and it's mostly because it's legacy, and hard to move away from it. The other half of the time it's application specific web servers, or other NGINX instances.

Source: Worked for Cloudflare and now work at NGINX

Can you cite a source for this?

In my practice, the servers behind nginx are usually platform-specific application servers, such as Gunicorn or uWSGI for Python.

Popular PHP CMS software also relies on .htaccess. Wordpress for example allegedly powers about a quarter of all websites, and auto-creates an .htaccess file when you enable pretty links, which basically everyone does. Drupal ships with multiple .htaccess files.

Sure it's possible to adapt this code into Nginx configuration, but there is really no reason to do that. It's far easier to set up Nginx in front of Apache and get most of the Nginx benefits that way.

There really are a lot of platforms.

Equally, there is a truckload of LAMP sites out there (Linux Apache MySQL Php) to give Apache the edge on pure quantity. It's been the standard for personal site hosting and forums for two decades. That's a long lasting effect. That's not where there is value and work for developers though.

Really? Completely disagree. Just look at the configuration files for these vs nginx.

Sorry if I don't hold your opinion to that high a standard in that case.

In the context of load balancing, on the performance + latency + load balancing mechanism + configuration files criteria, Apache is the worst by a huge margin compared to both HAProxy and nginx.

Maybe 5-7 years ago then yeah... maybe. Not even close today. Apache has lowest latency and faster total transaction time based on various benchmarks. It all depends on how you are using it.

"configuration files criteria"

Got me there. But then again, 2.4 adds a LOT of ways to even streamline that, like mod_macro, mod_define, etc...

Load balancing => Apache doesn't even support healthchecks. I won't even get into the lack of TCP/TLS support or the lack of some load balancing algorithms.

Also complete and total nonsense is the lack of health checks (which is, iirc, only available for paid nginx), TLS support and load balancing algos. I think nginx has some kind of hash LB method that httpd doesn't, although httpd has round-robin, byrequests, bytraffic, and bybusyness.

Wow.

HAProxy > nginx > apache

Of course if you compare apache to nginx, you can find stuff where nginx is lacking too.

Agreed, a lot of critical features are stripped in the open source nginx.

TLS = tcp with tls, not https.

I have no idea what in the heck you are talking about. If one must use mod_php than it is recommended that you avoid a threaded MPM, but even that is no longer 100% true; you can run mod_php and Event is most implementations with no issues at all.

"stuck in prefork mode" is a nonsensical phrase. prefork is a MPM.

Just because something is threaded doesn't make it slow. Take varnish for example. There are tradeoffs on all implementations, that's why Apache httpd allows for prefork, worker(threaded) and event-based architectures which the sysadmin/devops can choose for their own particular case. But "Oog. Event be Good. Threads be Bad" is really completely missing the very real tradeoffs of both.

For load balancing, events trumps every other mode, that's just the way it is.

HTTP and TCP balancing are inherently mono thread operations. There is no need for threading at all, multiple threads are actually decreasing performances).

In HTTPS and TLS mode, the encryption is the bottle neck. So you use one process per core (that process needs events).

HaProxy lets me have one process pinned down to each core of the system while network card IRQ are on a dedicated core. Apache can't do half of that.

We could get into how nginx and HaProxy parser are insanely optimized. Whereas apache is not and it cannot be because of the modules.

Of course, not everyone has to push 10g or 30k requests/s with their load balancers.

The rest of your "analysis" suffers from the same misinformation as this. I especially like "Whereas apache is not and it cannot be because of the modules.". I have no idea what in the world you mean by that. Why "because of the modules"?

This gives a lot of flexibility but it has a performance costs.

I feel the "marketing" concept is less actual marketing and more feature appeal, but I guess that's similar? Maybe not, though. Features provide actual value, whereas marketing is ... tricksy.

At my work we use IIS for our main website, but I've been asked to setup and configure a few wordpress installations. I've played around with both nginx and apache, but it was much easier to find clear instructions to setup wordpress on apache, so thats what I went with. I also really like apaches .htaccess support. Easy to lock down access to wp-admin by just dropping a .htaccess file in there restricting access to local ip range, instead of having to pollute the nginx config file with that sort of thing.

The way you're writing, you sound like you've tried one (Apache), and not really the other (nginx) and are basing your opinion on that, not on any merit-based evaluation...