Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By : Dimitri Aivaliotis
Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By: Dimitri 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 (20 chapters)
Mastering NGINX - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Directive Reference
Persisting Solaris Network Tunings
Index

Load-balancing


We've already shown some examples of using load-balancing in our discussion of upstream servers. Besides being a termination point for clients from the Internet as a reverse proxy, NGINX serves the function of a load balancer well. It can protect your upstream servers from overload by spreading out the connections that it proxies. Depending on your use case, you can choose one of three load-balancing algorithms.

Load-balancing algorithms

The upstream module can select which upstream server to connect to in the next step by using one of three load-balancing algorithms—round-robin, IP hash, or least connections. The round-robin algorithm is selected by default, and doesn't need a configuration directive to activate it. This algorithm selects the next server, based on the server that was selected previously, the server that is next in the configuration block, and the weight that each server carries. The round-robin algorithm tries to ensure a fair distribution of traffic, based...