Book Image

Nginx Troubleshooting

By : Alexey Kapranov
Book Image

Nginx Troubleshooting

By: Alexey Kapranov

Overview of this book

Nginx is clearly winning the race to be the dominant software to power modern websites. It is fast and open source, maintained with passion by a brilliant team. This book will help you maintain your Nginx instances in a healthy and predictable state. It will lead you through all the types of problems you might encounter as a web administrator, with a special focus on performance and migration from older software. You will learn how to write good configuration files and will get good insights into Nginx logs. It will provide you solutions to problems such as missing or broken functionality and also show you how to tackle performance issues with the Nginx server. A special chapter is devoted to the art of prevention, that is, monitoring and alerting services you may use to detect problems before they manifest themselves on a big scale. The books ends with a reference to error and warning messages Nginx could emit to help you during incident investigations.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Nginx Troubleshooting
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Rare Nginx Error Messages
Index

Using thread pools in Nginx


Using asynchronous, event-driven architecture serves Nginx well as it allows to save up on the precious RAM and CPU context switches while processing thousands and millions of slow clients in separate connections. Unfortunately, event loops, such as the one that power Nginx, easily fail when facing blocking operations. Nginx was born on FreeBSD, which has several advantages over Linux, and one of the relevant ones is a robust, asynchronous input/output implementation. Basically, the OS kernel is able to not block on traditionally blocking operations like reading data from disks by having its own kernel-level background threads. Linux, on the other hand, requires more work from the application side, and very recently, in version 1.7.11, the Nginx team released its own thread pools feature to work better on Linux. You may find a good introduction into the problem and the solution in this official Nginx blog post at https://www.nginx.com/blog/thread-pools-boost-performance...