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

Basic proxy service


The NGINX mail proxy module was originally developed for FastMail. They needed to provide a single IMAP endpoint for their users, while hosting the actual e-mail account on one of the number of upstream mail servers. Typical proxying programs of the time used the classic Unix forking model, which meant that a new process was forked for each connection. IMAP has very long-lived connections, which means that these processes would stay around for a very long time. This would then lead to very sluggish proxy servers, as they would have to manage these processes for the lifetime of each connection. NGINX's event-based process model was a better fit for this type of service. As an e-mail proxy, NGINX is able to direct traffic to any number of mailbox servers where the actual e-mail account is hosted. This provides the ability to communicate one endpoint to customers, while scaling the number of mailbox servers up with the number of users. Both commercial and opensource e-mail...