Nginx (pronounced as “engine x”) is a high performance and a low memory usage web server. Apache is a process-based web server and nginx is an asynchronous web server.
As nginx wiki says,
“The main advantage of the asynchronous approach is scalability. In a process-based server, each simultaneous connection requires a thread which incurs significant overhead. An asynchronous server, on the other hand, is event-driven and handles requests in a single (or at least, very few) threads.
First of all I have to say that I am not a Linux expert. But I use Linux almost 6 years. At first, I used it only to learn something else from Windows. As many other Linux rookies I started with Ubuntu . Ubuntu was fast and light so I decided to try it. I learned the basics and soon I started to testing Kubuntu and other flavors of Ubuntu, but always I was returning to Ubuntu with the more familiar to me gnome DE. Over the years Ubuntu was becoming better and easier and I was learning more things about Linux. I also used other distros within virtual machines but I never found any real reason to abandon Ubuntu. At some point I started to work more with Linux and less with Windows. Ubuntu was booting faster, shutting down faster and wanted less memory than Windows. And ofc I could update all my installed programs at once with a simple click or with 2 terminal commands. The software wasn’t a problem because even with Windows I was using open source software for everything. So eventual I stopped using Windows for everyday’s work and I was booting my Windows partition only when I wanted to play my favorite mmo games.