nginx

“All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection.” – David Wheeler Drupal is a leading open-source content management system and a major presence in the application development landscape. Drupal is used for everything from personal blogs to gigantic enterprise and governmental projects, and is in a class of its own for truly intensive app development, API development, and other complex work. Drupal is based on PHP, a scripting language which is easy to learn and easy to use for rapid prototyping, followed by a quick move to production. However, the basic operation of PHP can contribute to performance problems when a site needs to be able to scale rapidly due to short-term spikes in usage or long-term growth. Also, most Drupal sites use the Apache HTTP Server web server, which has its own performance limitations. [ more… ]

The live activity monitoring dashboard and API in NGINX Plus track many system metrics that you can use to analyze the load and performance of your system. If you need request-level information, the access logging in NGINX and NGINX Plus is very flexible – you can configure which data is logged, selecting from the large number of data points that can be included in a log entry in the form of variables. You can also define customized log formats for different parts of your application. One interesting use case for taking advantage of the flexibility of NGINX access logging is application performance monitoring (APM). There are certainly many APM tools to choose from and NGINX is not a complete replacement for them, but it’s simple to get detailed visibility into the performance of your applications by adding timing values to your code [ more… ]

The following is adapted from a talk given by Matt Williams at nginx.conf 2015, held in San Francisco in September. This blog post is the second of two parts, and is focused on caching and monitoring; the first part, focused on load balancing, can be found here. You can view the presentation slides or watch the video of the complete talk. Table of Contents – Part I, Load Balancing (previous post) 1:45 Benefits of Load Balancing/Caching 2:58 Load Balancing Methods 7:02 Which Method Should You Choose? 10:58 FYI Load Balancing 15:05 How to Ensure Session Persistence Table of Contents – Part II, Caching and Monitoring (this post) 17:08 Caching 19:33 FYI Caching 21:09 FYI Tuning 23:46 How to Find the Right Configuration 25:17 Why Monitor 26:30 Datadog 27:50 NGINX Monitoring Tools 28:40 Tools to Test With 29:45 Key Metrics 30:29 [ more… ]