Poor performance in serving of static files

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 09:45:22AM +0100, Jürg Lehni wrote:

> I just did that, with no measurable improvement.
> 
> I am aware that delays happen on both URLs sometimes, but 
> reloading the full site with an emptied browser cache for 
> example takes about one second on Apache, and double on Nginx. 
> And without having done any proper benchmarking, hitting any of 
> these rendered type pages after that just feels much slower and 
> less fluid on Nginx. I am really surprised!
> 
> And I am still wondering: Could it be that for a low traffic 
> site, Apache could actually outperform Nginx noticeably?

Most likely you are disk bound, thus with relatively low number of 
connections having only 2 nginx workers to block on disks is much 
worse than having process/thread per connection as in Apache case.  
Adding more workers may help.

You may also want to try file AIO[1].  But it may actually degrade 
performance as it looks like you are using Linux and under Linux 
it's not possible to use AIO without directio (i.e. filesystem cache 
won't work as a result).

[1] http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpCoreModule#aio

Note that you may need to recompile nginx with file AIO support, 
i.e. use "./configure --with-file-aio".

Maxim Dounin