I have previously talked about some of the most common nginx questions; not surprisingly, one such question is how to optimize nginx for high performance. This is not really overly surprising since most of new nginx users are migrating over from Apache and thus are used to having to tune settings and perform voodoo magic to ensure that their servers perform as best as possible.
Well I’ve got some bad news for you, you can’t really optimize nginx very much. There’s no magic settings that will reduce your load by half or make PHP run twice as fast. Thankfully, the good news is that nginx doesn’t require any tuning because it is already optimized out of the box. The biggest optimization happened when you decided to use nginx and ran that apt-get install, yum install or make install. (Please note that repositories are often out of date. The wiki install page usually has a more up-to-date repository)
That said, there’s a lot of options in nginx that affects its behaviour and not all of their defaults values are completely optimized for high traffic situations. We also need to consider the platform that nginx runs on and optimize our OS as there are limitations in place there as well.
So in short, while we cannot optimize the load time of individual connections we can ensure that nginx has the ideal environment optimized for handling high traffic situations. Of course, by high traffic I mean several hundreds of requests per second, the far majority of people don’t need to mess around with this, but if you are curious or want to be prepared then read on.
First of all we need to consider the platform to use as nginx is available on Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows as well as some more esoteric systems. They all implement high performance event based polling methods, sadly, nginx only support 4 of them. I tend to favour FreeBSD out of the four but you should not see huge differences and it’s more important that you are comfortable with your OS of choice than that you get the absolutely most optimized OS.
In case you hadn’t guessed it already then the odd one out is Windows. Nginx on Windows is really not an option for anything you’re going to put into production. Windows has a different way of handling event polling and the nginx author has chosen not to support this; as such it defaults back to using select() which isn’t overly efficient and your performance will suffer quite quickly as a result.
- Words by: Martin Fjordvald
- April 27, 2011
- 51 Comments