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

Caching integration


NGINX is superb at serving static content. It is designed to support over 100,000 simultaneous connections while using only minimal system resources. Integrating a dynamic web application into such a well-architected server may mean a performance hit for the server. We may not be able to support as many simultaneous connections, but that does not mean that we cannot still give our users a snappy web experience.

Caching was introduced in Chapter 5, Reverse Proxy Advanced Topics. In this section, we will take an in-depth look at integrating NGINX's caching mechanisms into a web application. Your web application may already cache to a certain extent. Perhaps it writes prerendered pages into a database so that an expensive rendering task does not have to be repeated at each page view. Or, even better, your application may write prerendered pages into the filesystem so that they can simply be served by NGINX's stellar static file performance. No matter the caching mechanism...