Configuration changes

I made some modifications to my nginx configuration this weekend to improve performance and clear up some bugs.

upstream backend {
    server 127.0.0.1:81 fail_timeout=120s;
}

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name syslog.tv;

    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.syslog.tv.log;

    gzip on;
    gzip_disable msie6;
    gzip_static on;
    gzip_comp_level 9;
    gzip_proxied any;
    gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml
    application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

   location / {
        root /var/www/syslog.tv;

        set $wordpress_logged_in "";
        set $comment_author_email "";
        set $comment_author "";

        if ($http_cookie ~* "wordpress_logged_in_[^=]*=([^%]+)%7C") {
             set $wordpress_logged_in wordpress_logged_in_$1;
        }

        if ($http_cookie ~* "comment_author_email_[^=]*=([^;]+)(;|$)") {
            set $comment_author_email comment_author_email_$1;
        }

        if ($http_cookie ~* "comment_author_[^=]*=([^;]+)(;|$)") {
            set $comment_author comment_author_$1;
        }

        set $my_cache_key "$scheme://$host$uri$is_args$args$wordpress_logged_in$comment_author_email$comment_author";

        client_max_body_size 8m;

        proxy_redirect off;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_pass_header Set-Cookie;
        proxy_cache cache;
        proxy_cache_key $my_cache_key;
        proxy_cache_valid 200 302 60m;
        proxy_cache_valid 404 1m;
        proxy_pass https://backend;
    }

    location ~* .(jpg|png|gif|jpeg|js|css …

Even more changes?

Yes, even more changes, these are basic changes that are there to improve the caching capabilities and also implement load balancing.

proxy_cache_path /var/www/nginx_cache levels=1:2 keys_zone=cache:8m max_size=1000m inactive=600m;
proxy_temp_path /tmp/nginx;
proxy_cache_key "$scheme://$host$request_uri";

The beginning

Where to begin? nginx would be a good start I suppose. It’s far easier and makes much for sense for you to actually read about nginx from it’s own website - https://nginx.org/en/ - but just to give a simple explanation too; `nginx is king of static content HTTP servers.`

Anyone that has dealt with Apache on medium to high traffic websites will know that Apache is bit of a `wheezy, old geezer` when it comes to content serving using it’s mpm-worker (threaded). Very often high traffic will cause server load to go through the roof but for serving dynamic content, there really is no better HTTP server than Apache, so this leaves us in a bit of a predicament; a high powered website with dynamic content and lots of static files like JS, CSS and imagery, what do we do?!

In this example `dynamic …

The problem

So lets get to the problem first. I have several lightly to medium loaded sites running on some virtual servers, they servers themselves are highly configured to run beautifully on our host environments, very, very RAM intensive but low disk I/O and low CPU usage.

As mentioned, the sites are relatively low loaded, they’ll generally hang around at between 3,000-5,000 unique hits a day and are run through Apache using PHP, various PHP modules and MySQL, a simple generic LAMP environment, yet customised to suit it’s surroundings and host.

The sites themselves run fine on that setup, no issues at all on normal days, but on set days of the week these sites can double in unique hits or even more than double, with KeepAlive enabled and a KeepAliveTimeout set low Apache has problems handling this kind of load (I should point out …

Love

I’ve fallen in-love with nginx (https://nginx.org/) over the last 6 months or so, I’d been an avid user of LighTTPD for a very long time before but started to look in to nginx mid year as a replacement. I learned that at my new job they used nginx for …