Nginx HTTP Server - Third Edition

Thread pools and I/O mechanisms

Before making important financial decisions, such as investing in an additional server or two, you should look to optimize your current setup to make the most of your existing infrastructure.

Relieving worker processes

In the case of websites that require heavy I/O operations, such as file uploads or downloads, the asynchronous architecture of Nginx can present a certain disadvantage: while the master process is able to absorb the incoming connections asynchronously, the worker processes can be blocked for relatively long periods of time by certain tasks (the most common one being reading data from hard disk drives or network drives).

Consider a simplified configuration with two worker processes; each HTTP request ...