nginx

listen vs server_name

The listen directive can be set to:

• An IP address/port combo.
• A lone IP address which will then listen on the default port 80.
• A lone port which will listen to every interface on that port.
• The path to a Unix socket.

location

location optional_modifier location_match {

    . . .

}

• (none): If no modifiers are present, the location is interpreted as a prefix match. This means that the location given will be matched against the beginning of the request URI to determine a match.
• =: If an equal sign is used, this block will be considered a match if the request URI exactly matches the location given.
• ~: If a tilde modifier is present, this location will be interpreted as a case-sensitive regular expression match.
• ~*: If a tilde and asterisk modifier is used, the location block will be interpreted as a case-insensitive regular expression match.
• ^~: If a carat and tilde modifier is present, and if this block is selected as the best non-regular expression match, regular expression matching will not take place

Optimizing nginx for high traffic loads

worker_processes  4;  # 2 * Number of CPUs

events {
    worker_connections  19000;  # It's the key to high performance - have a lot of connections available
}

worker_rlimit_nofile    20000;  # Each connection needs a filehandle (or 2 if you are proxying)


# Total amount of users you can serve = worker_processes * worker_connections