nginx

In today’s world, having a scalable and reliable web infrastructure is crucial to your site’s success. Monitoring NGINX Plus performance and the health of your load-balanced applications is critical, and acting on these metrics enables you to provide a reliable and satisfying user experience. Knowing how much traffic your virtual servers are receiving and keeping an eye on error rates allows you to triage your applications effectively. NGINX Plus includes enterprise-ready features such as advanced HTTP and TCP load balancing, session persistence, health checks, live activity monitoring, and management to give you the freedom to innovate without being constrained by infrastructure. The live activity monitoring feature (implemented in the NGINX Plus Status module) makes it easy to get key load and performance metrics in real time. The large amount of useful data about the traffic flowing through NGINX Plus is available both on the built-in [ 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 first of two parts, and is focused on load balancing; the second part, focused on caching and monitoring, is here. You can view the presentation slides or watch the video of the complete talk. My name is Matt Williams, and I’m the evangelist at Datadog. Datadog is a SaaS-based monitoring platform. We load up an agent on each host that you want to monitor and start collecting data on everything that’s going on, including metrics from NGINX, or Apache, or MySQL, or PostgreSQL, or the OS, or whatever, then bring it together on a nice dashboard. But I’m not here to talk about Datadog. Today we’re going to focus on “Scaling Web Applications with NGINX [ more… ]

NGINX and NGINX Plus are commonly used as web content caches, ranging from individual websites to some of the largest content delivery networks (CDNs) in the world, such as MaxCDN and CloudFlare. Microcaching is an effective method for accelerating the delivery of dynamic, non-personalized content by caching it for very short periods of time. In this article, we’ll see how to accelerate a WordPress-based application by up to 400x using the microcaching technique. Why Cache Content? The benefits of caching are two-fold: caching improves web performance by delivering content more quickly, and it reduces the load on the origin servers. The effectiveness of caching depends on the cacheability of the content. For how long can we store the content, how do we check for updates, and how many users can we send the same cached content to? Caching static content, such [ more… ]