proxy buffering for media files?

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 11:40:27AM -0400, bkosborne wrote:

> Why not just turn off buffering completely?

There are at least three reasons:

1) Turning off buffering will result in more CPU usage (and worse 
network utilization in some cases).

2) It doesn't work with limit_rate (not even talking about 
proxy_cache which implies disk buffering).

3) Even small memory buffering saves some backend connections, and 
you can tune number/size of buffers used based on the available 
memory.

General recommendation is to avoid switching off proxy_buffering 
unless your application really needs it, e.g. it does some form of 
HTTP low-bandwidth streaming and needs nginx to send data to 
a client immediately.

-- 
Maxim Dounin
http://nginx.org/en/donation.html