Smaller web servers have been event based since they first showed up, it is the natural way to build them. There was no epoll() available, but a select() loop is pretty much the same thing. The super useful thttpd had been around a long time at that time.
What caused people to start using non-forking web servers for regular public web applications was probably that PHP finally got a stable FastCGI mode going about ten years ago. Because, honestly, most of the web is PHP and it was even more dominant back them.
And when people posted their web server configs in forums at that time, nginx configs were much more readable and concise. The easier config format is what caused its popularity to soar, not that it used a particular syscall half a decade earlier.
Before nginx, lighttpd was a thing. It also comes with `spawn-fcgi` to handle fastcgi, but it's a little complex to set up. Back then people were also using `spawn-fcgi` with nginx, too. I remembered reading some tutorial and decided that I will continue to use Apache with mod_php due to complexity. When php-fpm come, I immediately switched.
At the expense of the memory footprint because developed with Go. Hi Caddy creator!
Makes sense to me that something built in a language with more memory safety than C would use more memory, but is it really significant in practice? I use go every day and memory usage has not been a significant issue for many applications.
There are other performance concerns of course, e.g. GC latencies, and at times the GC may bite you. See e.g. the "taming Go memory usage" story from a few days ago[1], but this usually isn't a huge concern for many use cases.
cmon now
terminal systems engineer brain is everywhere
$ apt-get install python3-certbot-nginx
$ sudo certbot --nginx -d example.com -d www.example.com
https://www.nginx.com/blog/using-free-ssltls-certificates-fr...
On the other hand, caddy seems to auto renew them as well - one less cron job:
> Automatic HTTPS provisions TLS certificates for all your sites and keeps them renewed.
https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https
Neat, but still not sold.
Overall, the entire thing seems very complex automagic black box last time I tried it (already years ago). Sometimes trying to make something easier can make it harder.
A lot of people still retain the notion that nginx is "just faster" or "just better" which is not necessarily the case. Apache with mpm-event is just fine for most applications.
There are other reasons to use nginx, and there are other reasons to use Apache. Both are fine, and I hear https://caddyserver.com/ is coming in hot!