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

Performance problems


When designing an application and configuring NGINX to deliver it, we expect it to perform well. When we experience performance problems, however, we need to take a look at the reasons that could cause them. It may be in the application itself. It may be our NGINX configuration. We will investigate how to discover where the problem lies.

When proxying, NGINX does most of its work over the network. If there are any limitations at the network level, NGINX cannot perform optimally. Network tuning is again specific to the operating system and network on which you are running NGINX, so these tuning parameters should be examined in your particular situation.

One of the most important values relating to network performance is the size of the listen queue for new TCP connections. This number should be increased to enable more clients. Exactly how to do this and what value to use depends on the operating system and optimization goal:

  • Linux:

    vi /etc/sysctl.conf
    
    net.core.somaxconn...