Optimizing Nginx for High Traffic Loads

http://blog.martinfjordvald.com/2011/04/optimizing-nginx-for-high-traffic-loads/

by ichilton • 15 years ago

95 22 15 years ago

blog.martinfjordvald.com

morganpyne• 15 years ago

I would also recommend that you gzip any static assets and use http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpGzipStaticModule to serve these pre-gzipped files.

No point in re-compressing the same files over and over again. I normally gzip all static assets as part of the deployment process.

jacques_chester• 15 years ago

Using this module and WP-supercache's gzipping feature has made a wordpress blog network I run astonishingly fast.

JshWright• 15 years ago

Perhaps even more importantly than not recompressing... If Nginx is reading gzipped files, rather than full size files, it reduces the pressure on filesystem cache. This increases the odds that the system won't have to go to the disk to find the requested resource.

clemesha• 15 years ago

If your app uses a database, you've got bigger problems than optimizing Nginx for high traffic loads.

That said, I absolutely love Nginx because it's so damn lightweight, and easy to setup and maintain.

peterb• 15 years ago

At scale, all components cause "bigger" problems: http server, app server, database/datastore, file system, load balancer, etc. Saying the database is a bigger problem is only true in specific situations.

mfjordvald3• 15 years ago

Even if your app does not use a database then you've still got bigger problems. Optimizing Nginx is often a bit of a joke as you don't really get a lot for your effort. I think reducing the IO impact of Nginx is probably the best thing you can do. CPU wise you're kinda stuck with the awesome stock performance.

brendoncrawford2• 15 years ago

> The biggest optimization happened when you decided to use Nginx and ran that apt-get install...

I recommend against doing this on Ubuntu Lucid without first installing the unofficial nginx PPA, unless you want to get stuck with v0.7.65.

mfjordvald3• 15 years ago

Thank you for pointing this out, I always tell people to do this so I should really take my own advice.

brendoncrawford2• 15 years ago

Well, it doesn't negate your statement. apt-get is still a great way to install nginx.

hartror• 15 years ago

I should do that. I assume there are no issues uninstalling nginx and installing the PPA and then nginx right?

cullenking• 15 years ago

I actually use apt-get to install it at first, which gives me boot scripts. At least on Debian, you can apt-get remove it and the init scripts will still be there. Meaning, I don't have to go find one on the internet. Might not work outside of debian :)

not_chriscohoat• 15 years ago

Some useful Nginx optimizations, but I've always found that the bottlenecks are far worse elsewhere. Nginx is a champ at serving static files, and I have it proxy all requests upstream to Apache (and use mod_wsgi because the majority of what I work with are Django apps). Optimizing the DB schema and queries have had the most positive performance increases by far, followed by Apache tweaks, and then finally Nginx config changes. But I really love the setup I use for how easy it is to get a Django app spun up.

originalgeek2• 15 years ago

I think he's got a little math problem. Many browsers will open up to 4 connections (possibly more, if config tweaked) to overlap requests for content, so you might want to consider this when configuring your worker_connections.

rryan2• 15 years ago

Each worker can handle many thousands of concurrent connections so this isn't really an issue. This is where nginx and Apache differ. Generally you want one worker per CPU core.

originalgeek2• 15 years ago

I know how nginx works, I use it all the time. He is saying if you have 1024 woker_connections, at 2 per connections per user, you'll get 512 users per worker process. But the truth with most modern browsers is it is 4 connections per user, woker_connections = 1024, that is more like 256 users. So if you really want to service 512 users, you need to set woker_connections to 2048. This is the math problem I was highlighting, a simple division problem.

I believe you are talking about worker_processes

thezilch• 15 years ago

This is not a math problem. It's a perception problem. In fact, even your assumption is wrong, on the number of connections a browser will open. Modern browsers will be found opening 6 to 8 connections, by default.

http://stevesouders.com/ua/report.php

patio11• 15 years ago

Note the absence of any particular setting which will cause it to crash if you get a link to your blog retweeted.

glares at Apache

anto1ne• 15 years ago

too bad there's not so much said about optimizing latency, serving a lot of traffic is not that difficult, but getting the best latency to serve your files 50ms faster can make a big difference

mfjordvald3• 15 years ago

This is kind of outside the scope of Nginx.

known• 15 years ago

Optimizing == Customizing as per your business needs

Optimizing Nginx for High Traffic Loads

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