[OPEN-ILS-DEV] nginx + Evergreen (was: Fixing the mixed-content warnings in My Account)

[Dan Scott]

On Sun, 2009-10-04 at 18:54 +1300, Chris Cormack wrote:
> 2009/10/4 Dan Scott <dan at coffeecode.net>:
> > 2009/6/2 Mike Rylander <mrylander at gmail.com>:
<snip>
> >>> Rather than trying to solve the problem in the Evergreen application
> >>> code, another approach would be to use something like nginx as a proxy
> >>> to serve up all known static types (*.js, *.png, *.gif, and the like)
> >>> / locations and to hand off the dynamic requests to Apache. nginx is
> >>> apparently able to serve up static content at higher concurrency and
> >>> using far less CPU & RAM than Apache requires. This would add one more
> >>> moving part to a production configuration, but it would have the
> >>> advantage of simplifying the application code (one less set of SSI to
> >>> deal with). Each server in a load-balanced cluster could be
> >>> responsible for serving up its own static content; or all static
> >>> content could be served up from a designated host; or in a simple
> >>> non-nginx environment, Apache could still serve up all static +
> >>> dynamic content.
> >>>
> >>> There's a good intro to nginx at
> >>> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10108 for those interested in
> >>> pursuing this direction.
> >>>
> >>
> >> That /is/ interesting, and definitely worth looking into (setting
> >> aside my reactionary fear of proxies with EG) for large installations,
> >> but I think it's more deserving of a "here's how to /really/ trick out
> >> your EG install" article.
> >
> > Made some headway on this tonight, documented at
> > http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=server_installation:nginx_proxy
> > - there's probably much more that can be done, but it's a start.
> >
> >> Maybe that goes into main-line once we see it in production at Conifer
> >> and all fears are put to rest?
> >
> > After some more testing on the virtual machine(s), I think we'll be
> > putting this into production. I definitely want to slow down the
> > recycling rate of our Apache processes. We'll let you know how that
> > works out.
> >
> For my day job I work on a large media site, which uses a mix of
> apache2, nginx and memcached to serve a large amount of dynamic pages
> with an even larger amount of static files.
> 
> I'm willing to have a chat with anyone who is interested about how we
> do it, there might be some nice tips for Evegreen.

Awesome, thanks for the offer Chris! I'll be happy to take you up on
that at some point.

> (We shifted 1.2 terrabyte today .. some of that traffic was 5.2
> million requests for 2 rss files .. nginx handles this kinda load
> without even blinking)

Hmm, that's a nice start, but will it scale up to meet the demands of a
large academic library system? </tongue_firmly_in_cheek>