nginx Performance Tuning: Practical Notes from Production
After running nginx on everything from 512 MB VPS instances to multi-socket bare metal, here are the settings I’ve found actually matter. worker_processes and worker_connections Start with worker_processes auto;. worker_processes auto; worker_rlimit_nofile 65535; events { worker_connections 4096; use epoll; multi_accept on; } Keepalive tuning http { keepalive_timeout 30s; keepalive_requests 1000; upstream backend { server 10.0.0.1:8080; keepalive 32; } } Buffer sizes client_body_buffer_size 128k; client_max_body_size 50m; proxy_buffer_size 8k; proxy_buffers 8 8k; gzip and brotli gzip on; gzip_comp_level 5; gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json; brotli on; brotli_comp_level 4; brotli_types text/plain text/css application/json; Measurement None of this matters if you don’t measure. Install nginx-module-vts or expose stub_status, feed metrics to Prometheus, and compare before/after for any changes.