Nginx NAS serving large files

[Igor Sysoev]

On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 08:29:05PM +0200, Graham D. wrote:
> Hello Ladies and Gentlemen,
> 
> We have a very frustrating problem with a NAS configuration that we
> recently set-up. After running a filesharing website on 8 servers for 1+
> years we decided to switch to a NAS configuration. We set-up our NAS
> (24x1TB Raid 5) to serve files to 9 front end servers over a private
> switch - doing 9 servers on 1 disk(logical)... not sure if nginx can
> handle this. Since we've moved to the NAS BW usage has dropped
> significantly even though our traffic has stayed the same. Download
> speeds are pretty bad aswell but this is due to IO issues that are being
> created by NGINX. so here's the problem we are facing...
> 
> In theory nginx is creating an io bottleneck because it's opening to
> many times without closing. We're using nginx on our front end servers
> to grab files off our nas - each file will stay alive though for 45+
> minutes. Instead of opening it for 10 seconds, reading into memory, and
> closing - it's opening it for 10 seconds, reading into memory, streaming
> it for 45 minutes, THEN closing. We ran a test with nginx and we were
> only able to download at 30kbps on port 182, how-ever over apache we
> were able to reach speeds of 20mb/s.
> 
> We've re-compiled nignx and installed the most recent stable version but
> that didn't fix anything.
> 
> Can someone please suggest a fix here? I've ran out of ideas...

What OS do you use ?

Try the following:

worker_processes  32;

http {
     sendfile   off;
     output_buffers  1 1m;
     ...
}


-- 
Igor Sysoev