proxy buffering for media files?

[bkosborne]

One thing I thought of is that proxy_buffering is ideal if you have slow
clients - where downloading the media files could take a long time. In this
case, the goal would be to free up upstream workers. However, since my
upstream is NOT an application server, and just nginx, is that really
necessary?

Only thing I can think of there is that it could be bad to keep all those
"slow" connections open when reading the response from disk. If there are
100 clients connection for different media files, and they are all
downloading very slow, maybe it would be a negative performance impact on
the storage servers to be reading all that at once. But with proxy_buffering
turned on, I assume that the entire response is read from disk RIGHT AWAY,
and then stored in the buffer on the proxy. But if the proxy is just writing
that response back to disk, doesn't really matter much does it

Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,242495,242498#msg-242498