How to Tune Nginx with Artifactory for Heavy Loads

In heavy traffic environments, Nginx plays a crucial role in handling requests. To make sure that it is operating at peak efficiency, we have several tuning suggestions and handy tips to help you avoid network bottlenecks.

keep_alive
It’s always expensive to create new connections for every new upstream connection. Control your overhead on network CPU costs by enabling keep_alive, which allows you to reuse existing connections. By default, Nginx will terminate the connections of all clients and create new connections.

upstream artifactory
  {
    keepalive 100;
    server artifactory:8081;
  }

worker_processes
This highly useful directive allows Nginx to simultaneously handle a large number of connections. The optimal value to set for worker_processes depends on many things, such as CPU, HDD, and on load pattern. However, the directive with the auto flag:

worker_processes auto;

will allow it to auto-detect and set the appropriate settings.

Monitor Your Logs
Nginx (or any web server) writes every request to an access log file, which consumes CPU and Disk I/O. Enabling access log buffering is one good option to decrease the write load by retaining your log entries in a buffer and, subsequently, saving them in a single operation, instead of writing each entry individually.
To enable access log buffering, add buffer=size to your access_log directive:

access_log /var/log/nginx/artprod.mycompany-access.log buffer=32k;