SSL Strangeness

[Igor Sysoev]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 06:53:04PM -0800, Curtis Spencer wrote:

> I am running 4 mongrels behind nginx with two servers blocks (one ssl
> enabled).  I have a public facing app that 20-30 users go through each
> day (non ssl) and administrative SSL controllers in the app that
> people at my office use. I am noticing that by the end of day after a
> lot of use of the SSL version of the app, that some requests are
> hanging for certain people in the office (Mac OSX and Windows Firefox
> 2.0.0.5-10).  It very rarely hangs on my machine (Linux), but it
> happens every now and then.  I don't think the mongrels are dying
> because usually when these people encounter the hangs we can go to
> other computers (Linux Windows OSX) in the office and hammer on the
> SSL portion of site with no problems.  Also, the non SSL version of
> the site never has any hanging AFAIK.

> One thing I did happen to notice as well, is if I do performance
> testing on SSL with httperf, at first it is decently fast, but on many
> sequential runs it consistently degrades until httperf can barely do
> any requests.  However, even while I do an httperf I can use the SSL
> version of the site with different computers.  It just hangs on some,
> usually towards the end of the day.

How many nginx worker processes do you use ?
Does nginx eat CPU while the test ?
Could you set

     ssl_session_cache    shared:SSL:10m;

and run httperf again ?


-- 
Igor Sysoev
http://sysoev.ru/en/