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

Operating system limits


The operating system is often the last place we look to for discovering a problem. We assume that whoever set up the system has tuned the operating system for our workload and tested it under similar scenarios. This is often not the case. We sometimes need to look into the operating system itself to identify a bottleneck.

As with NGINX, there are two major areas where we can initially look for performance problems: file descriptor limits and network limits.

File descriptor limits

NGINX uses file descriptors in several different ways. The major use is to respond to client connections, each one using a file descriptor. Each outgoing connection (especially prevalent in proxy configurations) requires a unique IP:TCP port pair, which NGINX refers to using a file descriptor. If NGINX is serving any static files or a response from its cache, a file descriptor is used as well. As you can see, the number of file descriptors can climb quickly with the number of concurrent users...