[BobVerg]

What purpose of the article if in the documentation at nginx.org/en/docs/ you can find the same?

And, btw, you are giving bad advices. You are wrong here: "By default, nginx sets our keep-alive timeout to 75s (in this config, we drop it down to 10s), which means, without changing the default, we can handle ~14 connections per second. Our config will allow us to handle ~102 users per second."

No, the keepalive connections doesn't limit nginx anyhow. Nginx closes keepalive connections when it reaches connection limit.

"gzip_comp_level sets the compression level on our data. These levesls can be anywhere from 1-9, 9 being the slowest but most compressed. We’ll set it to 6, which is a good middle ground."

No, it's not "middle ground". It kill performance of your server. With 6 you will get 5-10% better compression, but twice slowness.

"use epoll;"

What's the purpose of this? The docs says: "There is normally no need to specify it explicitly, because nginx will by default use the most efficient method."

"multi_accept tells nginx to accept as many connections as possible after getting a notification about a new connection. If worker_connections is set too low, you may end up flooding your worker connections. "

No, you have completely misunderstood this directive. It isn't related to worker_connections at all.

[BobVerg]

And even more:

"send_timeout 2;" Mobile clients from another continent will "thank you" for this setting when they cannot open your site.

"error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log crit;" A way to be unaware when something is wrong with your server. Nginx produces not only "crit" errors, but a bunch of very useful warnings, that need attention.

"limit_conn addr 10;" Chrome and Firefox usually open more than 10 connections. And btw, have you ever heard about NAT?

"Most browsers will open up 2 connections" 15 years ago this was true.

[VLM]

"Chrome and Firefox usually open more than 10 connections"

"and our value is 10,"

Both comments are similar in that there's no explanation why.

The correct value for limit_conn needs to be a balance between whatever your page designer or testing addons measured under normal operation, vs DOS/DDOS harm reduction (not prevention, just... reduction) where setting it to 100000 is probably a bad idea unless you're intentionally doing something really bizarre.

I liked the article for what it is, "explain which settings in nginx can be fine tuned in order to optimize performance for handling a large number of clients". It does a really poor job of explaining how to close the loop by benchmarking and monitoring followed by methodically determining which setting to fine tune and doesn't say much about config file version management either, but that's OK, it self described as a shopping list of performance oriented config options, and at that specific sub-task it delivered successfully. One minor area of improvement would have been to bracket the story with what comes before and after in the process... so your monitoring systems and operations procedures indicates xyz which implies you should ...

[rimantas]

  > Chrome and Firefox usually open more than 10 connections.

According to browserscope.org both browsers open only 6 connections per hostname.

[bjt]

For http connections that's true. Websockets have a separate pool though, and a much higher cap (200 in Firefox). Nginx recently added websocket support.

[jmngomes]

And gzip_min_length should probably be set to the MTU size

[mikehotel]

Looks like the author of the linked blog post is reading HN. They have modified the article in an attempt to address your criticisms.

[d0ugie]

.. and that's a good thing, the circle of HN life.