Performance choking around 400 req/sec?

Server NGINX
1

Hi everyone,

I should start by saying I am a newbie and have recently started using
NGINX and VERYY happy with it. But, I have been trying to run some
stress tests on NGINX (hitting a static file), and it looks like no
matter what I do, server is choking at around 400 req/sec. Isn’t this
too low for a static file on NGINX? Am I doing something wrong?

I have increased hard/soft limit to 30K/10K. My machine is reasonably
powerful (quad-core i7 with 8gb RAM) and during the tests, CPU load is
pretty low.

I used apache bench to do performance testing and I am hitting a
static file on local filesystem. I ran the test from 2 different
machines (nginx is on the 3rd machine) and used the following command
on each starting at the same time:

ab -n 10000 -c 400 http://mydomain.com/static.html

Results of one of these is below:

Document Length: 29638 bytes

Concurrency Level: 400
Time taken for tests: 33.856 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 300038664 bytes
HTML transferred: 297222704 bytes
Requests per second: 295.37 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 1354.241 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 3.386 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent
requests)
Transfer rate: 8654.48 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 6 448 1276.7 113 21113
Processing: 120 840 621.7 570 5980
Waiting: 5 186 176.3 114 2200
Total: 132 1288 1420.9 695 23143

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 695
66% 1134
75% 1474
80% 1721
90% 3027
95% 3685
98% 4688
99% 6445
100% 23143 (longest request)

Am I missing something here??? Relevant parts of NGINX Conf:

worker_processes 6;
worker_rlimit_nofile 30000;

events {
worker_connections 1024;
# multi_accept on;
}

http {

    sendfile on;
    tcp_nopush on;
    tcp_nodelay on;
    keepalive_timeout 65;
    types_hash_max_size 2048;
    # server_tokens off;

    # server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;
    # server_name_in_redirect off;

    log_format combined_perf '$remote_addr - $remote_user

[$time_local] ’
'“$request” $status $body_bytes_sent ’
'“$http_referer” “$http_user_agent” ’
‘[$request_time /
$upstream_response_time]’;

    access_log /var/log/nginx/root/access.log combined_perf;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/root/error.log error;

    ##
    # Gzip Settings
    ##

    gzip on;
    gzip_disable "msie6";

}

Thanks a ton!

2

Ah, forgot to mention that this is on a Ubuntu 11.10 box.

3

I have increased hard/soft limit to 30K/10K. My machine is reasonably powerful
(quad-core i7 with 8gb RAM) and during the tests,
CPU load is
pretty low.
I used apache bench to do performance testing and I am hitting a static file on
local filesystem. I ran the test from 2 different
machines (nginx is on the 3rd machine) and used the following command on
each starting at the same time:

Transfer rate: 8654.48 [Kbytes/sec] received

To be sure - what is your network speed (on the testboxes too)?
In case it’s like 100mbit then running ‘ab’ on 2 remote boxes each doing
8Mb/s download pretty much saturates the whole link and
there is nothing nginx can do.

Have you tried to do a local (on the same box) ‘ab’ bench or with
smaller file like 1kb ?

rr

4

Ah, that is exactly what the issue is… Server has 100 megabit/sec
and it was limited by that. When I tested it with a 1 KB file, I was
5K req/sec

Thank a ton!