Looking forward to a day when I can give Nginx another try when its feature set has matured in more directions. Its unfortunate lack of fine-grained versatility in some areas of configuration forced us to stick with Apache's httpd after trying to replace an old Apache setup with Nginx - everything looked much better in terms of resource efficiency, until we hit the problem of simply not being able to translate a few specific configuration scenarios from Apache to Nginx, forcing us to deem Nginx as a definite no-go for our case.
One problem that comes to mind is Nginx' inability to have multiple root dirs set for one and the same host depending on what location directive will be in use, for example when wanting to set unique root dirs during userdir mapping - which also happens to be something that Nginx can't do as properly as Apache. Another problem I can recall is how some configuration scenarios require an abundance of PCRE matching clauses to fulfill, which in turn causes Nginx a tangible but most noticable delay for each request that happens to match the implied regexp portion. I am not sure why this is the case, and I am not sure why it isn't so in Apache, where regexp clauses introduce no noticable stall.
We used something just like that to map users' home directories, but it doesn't solve the problem of not being able to set a unique root directory for each user case. Nginx accepts just one root dir setting, and it can't be conditionally set (or overwritten in a later if-else scenario) by putting it inside a location clause. One solution is to globally set /home as the definite root for all user location cases, but this does not sit alright with me - the document root should just not sit outside the target's home.
This example uses the alias directive, which can be set inside location clauses unlike the root directive. The distinction between root and alias isn't the most user friendly, but I think this setup is effectively the same as separate roots per user. Unless otherwise configured, users will not be able to access anything directly in /home, only in the user subdirectories.
That being said, I have no problems with Apache, especially if it's already in place and working.
Alias does not change the root dir, according to Nginx documentation. This was what made us believe that through eventual exploit, it could be possible to reach the active root dir through a completely different path as set per alias. In addition to that, having an erroneous document root communicated to CGI components such as PHP or mod_perl can lead to problems. We're still following Nginx development, in case things evolve.
Did I hit a nerve of some zealous Nginx user when mentioning the fact that Nginx isn't a silver bullet? :) I'm sure you can downvote this comment, too! Knock yourself out!
> Did I hit a nerve of some zealous Nginx user when mentioning the fact that Nginx isn't a silver bullet? :) I'm sure you can downvote this comment, too! Knock yourself out!
I don't believe the comments had anything to do with being a zealot, but instead a curiosity: being HN, it is useful to know why a user made a technical decision.
If you could elaborate on the problem, you're much less likely to get downvoted.
No you just gave a handwave "Nginx is not all that" without supporting the assertion. You would get the same response posting "Nginx is the greatest thing since sliced bread and you should ditch httpd."
I wasn't aware that this was a Q&A or issues tracker for Nginx, which is why I never had the intent of bringing details up. My apologies for posting these things in the official Nginx resources. The sarcasm is on the house.
The proper term for this effect is "raster bars", from how you traditionally did the effect by waiting for the raster line register to hit a certain vertical position on the screen, and then changing f.e. the background color of that scanline, then wait for the next line, change the color again etc. The name "copper bars" came out of the Amiga scene from how you could easily and without involving the CPU do this effect (and much more) on the Amiga using one of its co-processors, nicknamed the "Copper".
Which has taken over Perian / VLC almost entirely, for me. Perian has been utterly fantastic, a near ideal passive improvement for everything, but MPlayer smokes everything in performance.
"We currently do not ship internationally", anyone? That message right there, when I'm shopping online, annoys me to no end. Clever way of doing business.
Even more, if they know my address (since I'm a repeat customer and am logged in) and they won't ship some items to me because of my country - is it really too much to ask to mark those items clearly in the item selection? And filter search results based on which items I can actually buy?
Even Amazon currently just says "can't ship to this address" at the very end of checkout. What am I supposed to do at this point of web interface - quickly move to another country and then input the new address?
I wonder how many percentiles of the Windows number comes from Windows' re-re-re-re-install-ish nature. "Dang, my FPS is low, I gotta "format Windows" again."
I've always held install/download statistics to be just a rough, rough estimate. Personally, I know I can spin up a Windows VM within the span of a lunch break and run a script to automatically install all my default applications (even if I don't plan on using them). When I'm finished with whatever task I'm doing, I delete the VM.
With VLC and Firefox et al, I know reinstalls contribute to a lot of "downloads" numbers. I take the number at face value: it's popular enough to have been downloaded 1 billion times, regardless of how many people are using it right now.
I haven't had to reinstall Windows since upgrading to 7, and didn't really reinstall that often with XP either. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think this has been a big issue in quite a while.
I had a problematic driver state, where hibernate stoppped working. I put up with it for more than a year. Then I bothered to reinstall win 7. And I am amazed at how useful hibernate actually is in my day to day life! Also pressing the touchpanel and deactivating the wifi module use to kill the machine :|
I still have a 6 year old Vista partition from when it first launched somewhere (which has since been updated with SP2 ofc).
I have written off ever trying to make that drive look pretty again without breaking everything, but it does still boot and I think all the applications start. Baby steps M$!
If you want something smaller, faster and tons more efficient for OS X, I highly recommend MPlayerX instead. It's everything VLC is, and more, with none of VLC's bloat.
I used to be a Perian user, but its complications and shortcomings made me ditch it in favor of MPlayer OS X Extended, which eventually led me to the better MPlayerX. I am in favor of Perian's solution of being a nifty QT plugin, though.
