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

Reverse proxy performance tuning


NGINX can be tuned in a number of ways to get the most out of the application for which it is acting as a reverse proxy. By buffering, caching, and compressing, NGINX can be configured to make the client's experience as snappy as possible.

Buffering data

Buffering can be described with the help of the following diagram:

The most important factor to consider performance-wise when acting as a reverse proxy is buffering. NGINX, by default, will try to read as much as possible from the upstream server as fast as possible before returning that response to the client. It will buffer the response locally so that it can deliver it to the client all at once. If any part of the request from the client or the response from the upstream server is written to disk, performance might drop. This is a trade-off between RAM and disk. So, it is very important to consider the following directives when configuring NGINX to act as a reverse proxy:

Proxy module buffering directives...