Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server - Fourth Edition

By : Martin Bjerretoft Fjordvald, Clement Nedelcu
Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server - Fourth Edition

By: Martin Bjerretoft Fjordvald, Clement Nedelcu

Overview of this book

Nginx is a lightweight HTTP server designed for high-traffic websites, with network scalability as the primary objective. With the advent of high-speed internet access, short loading times and fast transfer rates have become a necessity. This book is a detailed guide to setting up Nginx in ways that correspond to actual production situations: as a standalone server, as a reverse proxy, interacting with applications via FastCGI, and more. In addition, this complete direct reference will be indispensable at all stages of the configuration and maintenance processes. This book mainly targets the most recent version of Nginx (1.13.2) and focuses on all the new additions and improvements, such as support for HTTP/2, improved dynamic modules, security enhancements, and support for multiple SSL certificates. This book is the perfect companion for both Nginx beginners and experienced administrators. For beginners, it will take you through the complete process of setting up this lightweight HTTP server on your system and configuring its various modules so that it does exactly what you need quickly and securely. For more experienced administrators, this book provides different approaches that can help you make the most of your current infrastructure. Nginx can be employed in many situations, whether you are looking to construct an entirely new web-serving architecture or simply want to integrate an efficient tool to optimize your site loading speeds.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Introduction to load balancing


All of the most visited websites in the world are built over carefully planned server architectures: fast page loads and download speeds are a requirement for long-term traffic growth. The concept of load balancing has the potential to solve problems pertaining to scalability, availability, and performance. After a quick description of the concept, we will elaborate on how Nginx offers to implement such an architecture.

Understanding the concept of load balancing

To put it simply, the concept of load balancing consists of distributing the workload (CPU load, hard disk load, or other forms) across several servers, in a manner that is completely transparent to your visitors.

In the case of a single-server architecture, client requests are received and processed by one machine. A machine has a limited capacity of operation; for example, a web server that is able to respond to 1,000 HTTP requests per second. If the server receives more than 1,000 requests per second...