what a worker does?

[Paul]

A worker is  a process of nginx.. Each process is multithreaded and can 
handle thousands of connections each.
You can have one worker and 50,000 connections to it, but it's good to 
have at least as many workers as you have CPUs and I usually multiply 
this times 4 (so 4 worker per CPU)..
Worker connections is how many connections each process (worker) can 
have open at one time (max files open, sockets, etc)

Paul

Marcos Neves wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I need some help to fully understand what´s a worker is.
> For example, if I have only one worker, and run a long request, like a
> file download/upload or a long running proxy script like php or rails.
> Will this block the server, so it can´t serve other client until de
> request finish?
>
> And what for worker_connections?
>
> I´m trying to understand the request flow on nginx, so I can optimize
> it the right way.
>
>