Tuning nginx on EC2

[Dennis Jacobfeuerborn]

On 12/11/2010 06:31 AM, Chetan Sarva wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been doing some benchmarks with nginx on EC2 and have run into a
> bit of a wall. I'm trying to establish a baseline from which to
> compare my application against. For this I'm using the simplest
> possible nginx config:
>
> server {
>          listen  80;
>          access_log off;
>          return 204;
> }
>
> With a large instance (1gbps nic), I've only been able to get up to
> about 12k reqs/sec despite the fact that all resources
> (cpu/mem/disk/network) appear to be under-utilized. My base platform
> is Ubuntu 10.04 with nginx 0.8.53. I've tried generating load from
> multiple nodes using a variety of tools, but still can't seem to push
> passed 12k. Perhaps there's just some limit within EC2 that I'm
> unaware of.
>
> I've tried tweaking lots of sysctl settings to no end, but it could be
> I just haven't found the correct one yet. Has anyone had any luck
> getting higher throughputs on ec2?

I don't have any direct experience with services like EC2 but remember that 
before the traffic hits your machine it first has to pass through various 
routers and switches in Amazons infrastructure that is shared between 
probably millions of EC2 instances. You might either hit a bottleneck on 
these shared components or maybe Amazon just has put some limitations in 
place to prevent abuse.

Regards,
   Dennis