Distinguishing between nginx and thin

Question

This is a newbie question around nginx and thin in the rails environment. In reading/learning on rails I frequently hear about nginx and thin being a great combination for a rails site. In reading the descriptions of each, they both describe themselves as web servers, so I'm a little confused at what the combination brings to the table. If anyone could briefly describe what they are and how they complement each other I would be greatly appreciative.

Thanks!

Answer 1

A typical small application deployment will have Nginx(or Apache) and a handful of Thin(or Mongrel, Unicorn, etc) servers running all on one machine.

Nginx receives every request. It then serves and static files directly (css, js, images, cached stuff). If the request requires processing it then hands the request off to a rails process (Thin).

This way your (relatively) slow application servers are freed up from serving static files, and your web server is providing a sort of load balancing.

The benefit of Nginx/Thin over something like Apache/Mongrel is that Nginx/Thin can communicate directly via a unix socket, removing the overhead of communicating via the tcp/ip stack.