Nginx is a free open-source web server with high performance and low weight, used as a load balancer, reverse proxy, HTTP cache and mail proxy. Although Nginx is quite new compared to other web servers, its popularity is increasing due to its high performance. With the default configuration of Nginx, you may get fast performance, but we can increase the performance of Nginx even more by changing some configurations.
In this article, you will learn 8 different ways to improve the performance of Nginx. To illustrate the example in this article, I installed Nginx on the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS system.
Modify Worker Processes
All web server requests in Nginx are handled by a worker process. In Nginx, the worker processes are created as multiple worker processes to handle the request and a master process is responsible for managing all the worker processes and analyzing the configuration. In the default configuration of Nginx, the worker process parameter is set to auto, which starts the worker process depending on the available CPU core. As recommended in the official documents of Nginx, it is the best way to keep the worker process according to the available CPU core, so auto is the recommended parameter. If you want to know how many cores your processors have, just run the following command.
$ grep processor /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l
You can change the default value of the worker process from the Nginx config file which is located at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. If your server is experiencing higher traffic and you need to add more worker processes it’s better to upgrade the server to more core processors.
Enhancing Worker Connections Limit
Worker connection is the total number of simultaneous connections each available worker process can manage. By default, the worker process can manage 512 connections at a time. Before modifying the worker connection value you must check the max connection system to allow using the following command to update the connection config according to it.
$ ulimit -n
To enhance the Nginx to its full potential set the worker connection value to the max connection system allow by the system in nginx.conf file.
Implementing Content Compression
For web content compression Nginx uses gzip to increase content delivery time and decrease network bandwidth usages. In the configuration, you could find the gzip config in the commented state but you can uncomment and modify the gzip according to your need. As gzip compression process uses system resources if you have limited resources modify the configuration according to it such as compressing only a specific type of file, compression level, etc.
Caching Static Content
In this modern-day web development, most of the contents are statically served to the browser or client so caching the static files will load the content faster. It will also decrease the connection request to the Nginx as contents are loaded from the cache. To start the caching process add the following directive to your Nginx virtual host config file.
location ~* .(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|css|js)$ {expires 30d;}
The above directive caches the resource file for 30 days. You can set the cache expiry date according to your need.
Buffering
Buffering can make the communication between client and server more efficient as its holds part of the response until the buffer fills. If the response is too high than the actual buffer size the Nginx will then write the response to the disk which may lead to a performance issue. You can update the following directive to adjust the buffer size according to your requirement.
Client_body_buffer_size: It determines the actual buffer size that is used to hold client response data.
Client_header_buffer_size: It manages the size of the client header. Normally setting the value to 1k is good enough.
Client_max_body_size: It limits the max body response allowed to the client. If the body size exceeds its value, Nginx will throw the error with “Request Entity Too Large”.
To adjust the buffering size add the following directive within the http section.
http {
…
client_body_buffer_size 80k;
client_max_body_size 9m;
client_header_buffer_size 1k;
...
}
Access Log Buffering
Logging is one of the pivotal roles in debugging the issue and auditing. As logging stores every request data which affects both I/O cycles and CPU that result in performance issues. You can reduce this kind of impact by enabling buffering to the log. Once the buffer size reaches its limit, Nginx writes buffer content to log. You can enable buffering by adding buffer parameters with size values to the access log directive.
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main buffer=16k;
Or you can disable the access log (if not needed) in the following way.
access_log off;
Limiting Timeout Values
Limiting the timeout value will enhance Nginx’s performance. Nginx will wait for the client’s body and header request for the given time period. If they do not receive the response data in time, Nginx triggers a time-out for the respective client. The time-out value can be managed by the following directive. To set the timeout duration, copy-paste the directive given below within the http section.
client_body_timeout 10; client_header_timeout 10; keepalive_timeout 13; send_timeout 10;
Client body and header timeout is a time period Nginx to read header and body from the client request. If not completed in time the request is terminated with time out error. Keepalive_timeout is the duration after nginx close the client connection keep-alive connection stay open. Send_timeout is the duration for which the client must receive the response sent by Nginx.
Open File Cache
In Linux almost everything is a file, when open_file_cache is used, the file descriptor and all the frequently accessed files are cached to the server. Especially when serving the static Html files using open file cache will enhance the Nginx performance as it open and store cache in memory for a given interval. Put the following directive of open_file_cache in the http section to initiate the caching.
http {
...
open_file_cache max=1024 inactive=10s;
open_file_cache_valid 60s;
open_file_cache_min_uses 2;
open_file_cache_errors on;
Conclusion
These are eight ways to increase performance of an Nginx web server by simple modification of the Nginx config file. I hope reading this article will help you to improve your Ngunx setup to get the highest possible performance on your server, server or cloud system.