node.js itself or nginx frontend for serving static files?

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I’ll have to disagree with the answers here. While Node will do fine, nginx will most definitely be faster when configured correctly. nginx is implemented efficiently in C following a similar pattern (returning to a connection only when needed) with a tiny memory footprint. Moreover, it supports the sendfile syscall to serve those files which is as fast as you can possibly get at serving files, since it’s the OS kernel itself that’s doing the job.

By now nginx has become the de facto standard as the frontend server. You can use it for its performance in serving static files, gzip, SSL, and even load-balancing later on.

P.S.: This assumes that files are really “static” as in at rest on disk at the time of the request.

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