Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server, Third Edition

By : Clement Nedelcu
Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server, Third Edition

By: 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 free, open source solution will either come as a full replacement of other software such as Apache, or stand in front of your existing infrastructure to improve its overall speed. This book is a detailed guide to setting up Nginx in different 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 directive reference will be your best friend at all stages of the configuration and maintenance processes. 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 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 (17 chapters)
Nginx HTTP Server Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Thread pools and I/O mechanisms


Before making important financial decisions, such as investing in an additional server or two, you should look to optimize your current setup to make the most of your existing infrastructure.

Relieving worker processes

In the case of websites that require heavy I/O operations, such as file uploads or downloads, the asynchronous architecture of Nginx can present a certain disadvantage: while the master process is able to absorb the incoming connections asynchronously, the worker processes can be blocked for relatively long periods of time by certain tasks (the most common one being reading data from hard disk drives or network drives).

Consider a simplified configuration with two worker processes; each HTTP request received by Nginx gets assigned to either process. Within a process, operations are performed sequentially: receiving and parsing the request, reading the requested file from its storage location, and finally preparing and sending the response to the...