[e98cuenc]

The difference is that nginx really works. I had Panoramio, a photo website featured in Google Earth / Maps, using Apache. It started to fail down under load, and I quickly switched to lighttpd. It was faster but crashing, getting OOM, etc. I fixed a memory leak and a few more bugs, but it still crashed every now and then and I looked for alternatives.

This was 2006 and nginx was the only realistic alternative on the market. It worked beautifully since day 1. It saved my startup. Next year we got acquired by Google.

I only got 1 crash with nginx and it was partially my fault, I had an "expires 30y" on some images, and a morning on feb 2008 I came to the office and the whole site was down. After a very quick gdb session under panic I realized it was trying to get a weekday name on an array with a negative index. Nginx was adding 30 years to the current date and that was over 2038 and it overflowed. Igor fixed that issue in hours, and he graciously explained that I could have used "expires max"

Nginx has powered all my startups since then (Freepik, Flaticon, Slidesgo, Besoccer).

This guy has added more real value to the economy than most unicorns. A true hero.

[ciberado]

Panoramio, Freepik and Flaticon? Man, you just collapsed what I thought there was an early Spanish startup success story and two different corporations from the US into a single person :D Maximum respect.

[causalmodels]

Wait you made Flaticon? I would like to to say thank you. Before I truly got into software I was a humble associate consultant and I honestly don't know how I would have made all those decks without you.

[e98cuenc]

Thank you! My partner Alejandro Sánchez is actually who got the idea of Flaticon, and Fernando Fernández did most of the initial implementation. When we hired Fernando he was flipping burgers at BurgerKing :)

[vassilevsky]

Panoramio was so good. I had photos there. People wrote me comments. Then Google just killed it. Fuck them.

[piyushpr134]

Major Panoramio fan here. I have traveled a lot of places on that site. Thank you for making it :)

[stormbrew]

Yeah thanks to this thread I am definitely now remembering running into issues with memory usage and crashes with lighttpd.

[ryuta]

Thanks for making Freepik

[pachico]

Panoramio user here! Big fan!

[bbu]

panoramio was amazing, thank you! a shame it was shutdown by g*gle.