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.