Caching needed, but makes kitty sad.

[Arvind Jayaprakash]

On Jun 12, Jessica Hawkwell wrote:
> Hai peeps! =^_^=
>
> I have a system that stores a lot of images in a database.  What I'm 
> running is an avatar site, and there are times when it seems everyone has 
> decided to update their avatars all at the same time.  With nearly 70% of 
> our non-static image requests being little 32x32 icons for all the items 
> that can be equipped, mass amounts of icon loads sometimes makes the site 
> run about a second or two slower than usual.
>
> I came to the obvious conclusion the best way to resolve this is to have 
> nginx cache these little item icons.  Unfortunately, I have tried and 
> failed to make this happen.  I think having nginx caching them would 
> greatly improve performance since it would not have to access the back-end 
> FastCGI servers to get the icons, they'd be local (which is always faster, 
> so yay).  Below is the server block in question, I apologize in advance if 
> the regex for /avatars/ causes any negative side effects.
>
>        server {
>                listen 80;
>                server_name varusonline.com;
>                root /usr/local/www/varusonline.com/;
>
>                location / {
>                        gzip on;
>                        gzip_types image/png image/gif image/jpeg text/plain 
> text/javascript text/css;
>                }
>
>                location /avatars/ {
>                        rewrite 
> ^/avatars/([-0-9]+)(|_head|_full)\.(png|gif|jpg)(\?(.*))?$ 
> /avatar.php?u=$1&show=$2&format=$3&$5 last;
>                }
>
>                location /domains/ {
>                        rewrite 
> ^/domains/([a-z]+)/([-0-9a-z.,]+)/([-0-9a-z.]+)?(\?(.*))?$ 
> /domains.php?$1=$2&item=$3&$5 last;
>                }
>
>                location /img_view/ {
>                        set $img $document_uri;
>                        rewrite ^/img_view/(avi|bod)-([0-9]+).png$ 
> /img_view.php?subset=$1&img_id=$2 last;
>                        set $droot /usr/local/www/caches/img_view/;
>
>                        proxy_store $droot${img};
>
>                        if (!-f $droot${img}) {
>                                fastcgi_pass fcgi;
>                        }
>
>                        if (-f $droot${img}) {
>                                expires max;
>                        }
>                }
>
>                location ~ \.php$ {
>                        fastcgi_pass fcgi;
>                }
>        }
>
> Through all of this with everything I have tried, the cache folder is still 
> empty, which makes this little kitty sad.  Is there a way to make nginx 
> cache images from just that one script?

Is your php script returning the appropriate cache control headers?