# Using nginx to cache file serving **URL:** \ **Category:** NGINX\ **Created:** [December 5, 2013, 12:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/using-nginx-to-cache-file-serving/237903 "2013-12-05T12:00:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![musicdenotation](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ea666f/32.png) [@musicdenotation](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/musicdenotation)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2013, 12:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/using-nginx-to-cache-file-serving/237903/1 "2013-12-05T12:00:37Z")
Hi We are using nginx & SATA disks on several of our file servers.However after hitting 12MBytes/s of port speed (server nic is a 1gbps), the server gets down to it’s knees. SSH becomes very slow/unresponsive and our users complain about slow speeds and dropped connections. Our users/downloaders have very slow speed (like 512kbits/s) so there are lots of users downloading from each server. I thought the problem was from using SATA disk and the bottleneck was the HDD IO speed.So we ordered a new server with SAS hdds & RAID0, the performance has been great and our server is serving about 20MBytes/s, (same provider) However I’m still not satisfied. 1.Is there any configuration options I’m missing? I’m using the default config. 2. Both servers rams are fully utilized and the memory is 100% filled, When I stop nginx the memory is still used up but why? (there is no other service running on the server) If this is the nginx cache, why it’s not emptied when I exit/kill nginx processes? 3. My most important question is, Is it possible/wise that I use the SAS server as a rev-proxy/cache to serve the downloads from the SATA server? My idea is when a user connects to the SAS server to download a file, The SAS server requests the file from the SATA server(using the internal connection in datacenter), caches it on it’s fast disk, then serves the file to my slow downloader. This way the SATA HDD doesn’t have to seek to the file location each time and since there are lots of downloaders this happens a lot. Sorry for the long message and thank you for your time Mojiz Posted at Nginx Forum: > **[using nginx to cache file serving](https://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,245244,245244#msg-245244)** > > Hi We are using nginx & SATA disks on several of our file servers.However after hitting 12MBytes/s of port speed (server nic is a 1gbps), the server gets down to it's knees. SSH becomes very slow/unresponsive and our users complain about slow... ---
**Author:** ![mojiz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/a87d85/32.png) [@mojiz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mojiz)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2013, 12:14pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/using-nginx-to-cache-file-serving/237903/2 "2013-12-05T12:14:04Z")
1. Depends a lot on your environment. If you are sure you are I/O bound, there isn’t too much you can tweak. 2. How are you measuring this? It’s normal for there to be very little “free” memory on Linux due to buffers and filesystem caches. Look at the -/+ buffers/cache line for your available memory. If you are actually running out of memory and hitting swap, this is likely why performance is so low. 3. Take a look at ngx\_slowfs\_cache, it sounds like it might fit the bill - [http://labs.frickle.com/nginx\_ngx\_slowfs\_cache](http://labs.frickle.com/nginx_ngx_slowfs_cache) Rich. ---
**Author:** ![mojiz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/a87d85/32.png) [@mojiz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mojiz)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2013, 3:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/using-nginx-to-cache-file-serving/237903/3 "2013-12-05T15:39:46Z")
Thanks for the answeres. about the memory the problem is I’m hitting this on only some of my servers but not all, one of my servers has only 3GB memory which 1G is used but on another 16GB/16GB is used. The ngx\_slowfs\_cache module is usefull when the server has 2 type disks, SATA and SAS, but I have two servers which I want to do the proxying. I’m looking at the included proxy module something like this: proxy\_buffers 10240 128k; #needs 1.2GB memory proxy\_cache\_path /dev/sas\_disk/cache; proxy\_max\_temp\_file\_size 2048m; proxy\_store is tempting: proxy\_store on; proxy\_temp\_path /dev/sas\_disk/temp; root /dev/sas\_disk/www; is this what i’m looking for? Posted at Nginx Forum: > **[Re: using nginx to cache file serving](https://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,245244,245251#msg-245251)** > > Hi We are using nginx & SATA disks on several of our file servers.However after hitting 12MBytes/s of port speed (server nic is a 1gbps), the server gets down to it's knees. SSH becomes very slow/unresponsive and our users complain about slow...