NGINX Cookbook, 3rd Edition

Chapter 15. Performance Tuning

15.0 Introduction

Tuning NGINX will make an artist of you. Performance tuning of any type of server or application is always dependent on a number of variable items, such as, but not limited to, the environment, use case, requirements, and physical components involved. It’s common to practice bottleneck-driven tuning, meaning to test until you’ve hit a bottleneck, determine the bottleneck, tune for limitations, and repeat until you’ve reached your desired performance requirements. In this chapter, we suggest taking measurements when performance tuning by testing with automated tools and measuring results. This chapter also covers connection tuning for keeping connections open to clients as well as upstream servers, and serving more connections by tuning the operating system.

15.1 Automating Tests with Load Drivers

Problem

You need to automate your tests with a load driver to gain consistency and repeatability in your testing.

Solution

Use an HTTP load-testing tool such as Apache JMeter, Locust, Gatling, or whatever your team has standardized on. Create a configuration for your load-testing tool that runs a comprehensive test on your web application. Run your test against your service. Review the metrics collected from the run to establish a baseline. Slowly ramp up the emulated user concurrency to mimic typical production usage and identify points of improvement. Tune NGINX and repeat this process until you achieve your desired results.