Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server - Fourth Edition

By : Martin Bjerretoft Fjordvald, Clement Nedelcu
Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server - Fourth Edition

By: Martin Bjerretoft Fjordvald, 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 book is a detailed guide to setting up Nginx in 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 direct reference will be indispensable at all stages of the configuration and maintenance processes. This book mainly targets the most recent version of Nginx (1.13.2) and focuses on all the new additions and improvements, such as support for HTTP/2, improved dynamic modules, security enhancements, and support for multiple SSL certificates. 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 that 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 (13 chapters)

Truncated or invalid FastCGI responses


When setting up an Nginx frontend for a website that heavily relies on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), along with a FastCGI backend such as PHP, you may run into different sorts of problems. If your server returns truncated AJAX responses, invalid JSON values, or even empty responses, you may want to check your configuration for the following elements:

  • Have you set up a writable directory for FastCGI temporary files? Make sure to do so via the fastcgi_temp_path directive.
  • If fastcgi_buffering is set to off, all FastCGI responses are forwarded to the client synchronously, in chunks of a certain size (determined by fastcgi_buffer_size).
  • In some cases, increasing the size and number of buffers allocated to storing FastCGI responses prevents responses from getting truncated. For example, use fastcgi_buffers 256 8k; for 256 buffers of 8 kilobytes each.