Tengine, a customized Nginx, goes to open source

[Joshua Zhu]

Hi guys,

We're glad to announce that Tengine (http://tengine.taobao.org), our
home-baked Nginx at Taobao now becomes an open source project.

Taobao (http://www.taobao.com) is the largest e-commerce website in Asia
and ranked #12 on Alexa’s top global sites list. Our website serves
billions of page views per day. For busy website as us, Nginx is obviously
the best choice. Thanks to Nginx's high performance, small footprint and
flexibility, we have done more with less.

We first learned the Nginx internals by using it as a traditional web
server and developing dozens of modules. Then from June of this year we
started hacking the Nginx core to expand its capabilities. As some of the
features we have developed may also benefit other Nginx users and websites,
so why not open source them? We do not want to be just open source software
users, but also open source contributors. That's why the Tengine open
source project came out.

Tengine is based on the latest stable version of Nginx (Nginx-1.0.10). Here
are a few features and bug fixes you may be interested in Tengine:
1) Logging enhancement. It supports syslog (local and remote) and pipe
logging. You can also do log sampling, i.e. not all requests have to be
written.
2) Protects the server when the system load and memory use goes high.
3) Combines multiple CSS or JavasScript requests into one request to reduce
the downloading time.
4) Sets the worker process number and CPU affinities automatically. Setting
Nginx's worker_cpu_affinity is not a pain any more.
5) Enhanced limit_req module with whitelist support and more limit_req
directives in one location.
6) More operations engineer friendly server information, so host can be
located easily when error happens.
7) More command lines support. You can list all modules compiled in and the
directives supported, even the content of configuration file itself.
8) Set expiration for files according to specific content type.
9) Error pages can be set back to 'default'.
10) ...

Basically, Tengine can be considered as a better or superset of Nginx. You
can download the tar ball here:
http://tengine.taobao.org/download/tengine-1.2.0.tar.gz

We want to say thank you to the Nginx team, especially to Igor. Thank you
very much for your great work! We would love to donate the patches against
the Nginx-1.1 branch later if you think the patches are okay.

Frankly, I'm not sure whether the features in Tengine right now can impress
you guys or not. It's the first step we moving towards open source after
all. We have built a team working on Tengine and have quite a long to-do
list. I promise you more enhancements are coming out.

Regards,

-- 
Joshua Zhu
Senior Software Engineer
Server Platforms Team at Taobao
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