Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By : Aivaliotis
Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By: Aivaliotis

Overview of this book

NGINX is a high-performance HTTP server and mail proxy designed to use very few system resources. But despite its power it is often a challenge to properly configure NGINX to meet your expectations. Mastering Nginx is the solution – an insider’s guide that will clarify the murky waters of NGINX’s configuration. Tune NGINX for various situations, improve your NGINX experience with some of the more obscure configuration directives, and discover how to design and personalize a configuration to match your needs. To begin with, quickly brush up on installing and setting up the NGINX server on the OS and its integration with third-party modules. From here, move on to explain NGINX's mail proxy module and its authentication, and reverse proxy to solve scaling issues. Then see how to integrate NGINX with your applications to perform tasks. The latter part of the book focuses on working through techniques to solve common web issues and the know-hows using NGINX modules. Finally, we will also explore different configurations that will help you troubleshoot NGINX server and assist with performance tuning.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
10
A. Directive Reference
13
D. Persisting Solaris Network Tunings
14
Index

Keepalive connections


The keepalive directive deserves special mention. NGINX will keep this number of connections per worker open to an upstream server. This connection cache is useful in situations where NGINX has to constantly maintain a certain number of open connections to an upstream server. If the upstream server speaks HTTP, NGINX can use the HTTP/1.1 persistent connections mechanism to maintain these open connections.

An example of such a configuration follows:

upstream apache {

  server 127.0.0.1:8080;

  keepalive 32;

}

location / {

  proxy_http_version 1.1;

  proxy_set_header Connection "";

  proxy_pass http://apache;

}

Here, we've indicated that we'd like to hold open 32 connections to Apache running on port 8080 of the localhost. NGINX need only negotiate the TCP handshake for the initial 32 connections per worker, and will then keep these connections open by not sending a Connection header with the close token. With proxy_http_version, we specify that we'd like to speak...