nginx and VirtualBox, heavy load

[Gena Makhomed]

John Moore wrote:

> I have been using nginx very successfully as a reverse proxy (in front 
> of a bank of web servers) on Linux. For a special project I'm working 
> on, we were hoping to use the same setup but running in a Linux virtual 
> machine under VirtualBox, hosted on a Windows 2003 Server machine 
> (forced on us by other software considerations!). I've been a little 
> disappointed in my stress testing (with ab and my own Java testing tool) 
> to find that under heavy load (multiple concurrent users), a lot of 
> requests are failing, with the error being the 'connection reset by 
> peer'. Now, I'm not sure that the requests are even reaching nginx (is 
> there a way to tell?), but if it is, what might be causing this error? 

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1006619
Performance issues with bridged networking and Windows Server 2003 SP2

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/904946
You experience intermittent communication failure
between computers that are running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003

> And if this is in fact OT and it's a networking problem, can anyone give 
> me any pointers :)? I should say that this using VirtualBox's NAT and 
> in-built port forwarding. nginx is 0.6.35, on Ubuntu.

try use free VMware Server 2.0.1 with paravirtualized linux VM drivers,
may be this is VirtualBox issue. not use NAT, use bridged networking.

also try look at error.log of nginx with info loglevel
inside Linux VM inside VirtualBox inside Windows 2003 Server,
may be worker_rlimit_nofile parameter and kernel need to be tuned.
something like this:

# cat /etc/sysctl.conf | grep net.core.somaxconn
net.core.somaxconn = 10240

# cat /etc/nginx/nginx.conf | grep worker_rlimit_nofile
worker_rlimit_nofile 10240;

-- 
Best regards,
  Gena