# Nginx serving static files - caching? **URL:** \ **Category:** NGINX\ **Created:** [November 12, 2010, 10:15am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/nginx-serving-static-files-caching/199012 "2010-11-12T10:15:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Dobai-Pataky\_BSSSSl](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/77aa72/32.png) [@Dobai-Pataky\_BSSSSl](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Dobai-Pataky_BSSSSl)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2010, 10:15am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/nginx-serving-static-files-caching/199012/1 "2010-11-12T10:15:51Z")
Hi, we want to establish some service that will deliver static files (images) with a size between 1-120 KB. The service should handle (at the moment) ~130.000.000 requests per month, so not that few and not extremly many requests. The to-be-served files have a size of several hundred GBs in total. Some of the files (5-10%) are asked more frequently and the bigger part less frequently. Let’s say we have 16 GB Ram available for the server. We could simply avoid using some caching mechanism and read the files from disk. For my scenario: is it possible to establish some reasonable caching? No decision regarding the to-be-used technology is made so far. An associate favours varnish (with some webserver as backend) and some least recently used strategy, i’d give nginx+memcached a try. Any recommendations? Posted at Nginx Forum: > **[nginx serving static files - caching?](https://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,150069,150069#msg-150069)** > > Hi, we want to establish some service that will deliver static files (images) with a size between 1-120 KB. The service should handle (at the moment) ~130.000.000 requests per month, so not that few and not extremly many requests. The to-be-served... ---
**Author:** ![revirii](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/d2c977/32.png) [@revirii](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/revirii)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2010, 10:25am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/nginx-serving-static-files-caching/199012/2 "2010-11-12T10:25:55Z")
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 4:14 PM, revirii [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Let’s say we have 16 GB Ram available for the server. We could simply > avoid using some caching mechanism and read the files from disk. For my > scenario: is it possible to establish some reasonable caching? No > decision regarding the to-be-used technology is made so far. An > associate favours varnish (with some webserver as backend) and some > least recently used strategy, i’d give nginx+memcached a try. Any > recommendations? how about you… let your operating system to handle it? – O\< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - [www.asciiribbon.org](http://www.asciiribbon.org) ---
**Author:** ![revirii](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/d2c977/32.png) [@revirii](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/revirii)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2010, 3:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/nginx-serving-static-files-caching/199012/3 "2010-11-12T15:36:11Z")
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 3:24 AM, Edho P Arief [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > how about you… let your operating system to handle it? Agreed. There’s no reason to try to re-implement what the OS already does with the file-system cache; you’ll probably do it poorly. If you’re using FreeBSD, simply using nginx by itself is probably your best bet as you can enable asynchronous IO. Varnish and nginx proxy\_cache a great at caching, but there’s no reason for that tier unless you’re caching dynamically generated assets (or have a very slow back-end such as Amazon S3). ## If you’re using Linux, AIO doesn’t work unless you’re using direct IO (bypassing filesystem cache), so you will probably want to use a large number of nginx workers to keep throughput up even though disk IO is blocking. With 130,000,000 requests per month, that’s 50 requests per second average. I assume that you will see peaks several times that number, so you will want to tune the number of worker processes based on the average request duration, IO load, etc. It all depends on your cache hit ratio and the patterns of your clients. We use 10 nginx workers on a dual-core machine to serve about 150M requests per month, but our content set is only about 80 GB and the cache hit ratio is very high. RPM ---
**Author:** ![revirii](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/d2c977/32.png) [@revirii](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/revirii)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2010, 5:07pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/nginx-serving-static-files-caching/199012/4 "2010-11-12T17:07:55Z")
revirii wrote: > avoid using some caching mechanism and read the files from disk. For my > scenario: is it possible to establish some reasonable caching? No > decision regarding the to-be-used technology is made so far. An > associate favours varnish (with some webserver as backend) and some > least recently used strategy, i’d give nginx+memcached a try. Any > recommendations? I’m investigating Kyoto Cabinet/Kyoto Tycoon for a caching strategy at the moment and I can recommend it, though the use case is lots of small text files. If you don’t know, Kyoto Cabinet is a file based “key-value” database. There are various flavours of Cabinet, one of which is a “directory” database, so if you create a Cabinet with a ‘.kcd’ extension then the resulting database just stores each object as a unique file in a directory. Kyoto Tycoon then is a HTTP server through which you can access (one or many) databases via GET and POST. You can access the databases directly, but one of the benefits of using Tycoon is auto-expiration - whenever you set a value you can give an expiry time and the file will be removed after that. Honestly not an expert in this sort of thing, but the setup I’m looking at is: ``` [nginx] -> [4 x Tornado] -> [16 x Kyoto Tycoon] -> [4096 x Kyoto ``` Cabinet] Tornado being the Python webserver which, as well as actually retrieving the data from a remote source, makes the decision of which database to store items based on a hash of the url. I’m thinking of a single server (box), but since it’s all HTTP I suppose you could have a fan out among servers if required. Again, not an expert, and this is all exploratory at this point, so take with a pinch of salt. ---
**Author:** ![revirii](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/d2c977/32.png) [@revirii](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/revirii)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2010, 2:24am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/nginx-serving-static-files-caching/199012/5 "2010-11-15T02:24:30Z")
On 11/12/2010 4:14 AM, revirii wrote: > Let’s say we have 16 GB Ram available for the server. We could simply > avoid using some caching mechanism and read the files from disk. For my > scenario: is it possible to establish some reasonable caching? No > decision regarding the to-be-used technology is made so far. An > associate favours varnish (with some webserver as backend) and some > least recently used strategy, i’d give nginx+memcached a try. Any > recommendations? I’d consider using a RAIDed SSD for storage to achieve the highest performance. – * * * Robert La Ferla VP Engineering OMS SafeHarbor This message (and any attachments) contains confidential information and is protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, you should delete this message and are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, distribution, or the taking of any action based on this message, is strictly prohibited.