nginx

TL;DR If you are comfortable with Docker and Docker Compose, you can go straight to the GitHub repo and get started. For the everyone else, read on…

When I stood up this website, I wanted to do so in Docker, but I ran into an issue: the official WordPress Docker image runs Apache. Apache is a nice webserver for small amounts of traffic, but it does not scale well. As more concurrent connections come into a server running Apache, more copies of the httpd process are forked, which causes RAM usage to go up. Having RAM usage regularly go up and down is not ideal.

Fortunately, there is a better way. The Nginx webserver, combined with PHP running in FPM mode scales much better as the memory usage is more constant, which means that peak loads on the server won’t cause you to thrash the swapfile. Encryption would also be nice, so I wanted to have some SSL going as well.

I couldn’t find any existing solutions, so I built one! In this post, I’m going to walk through each piece of the puzzle.

The Challenge

When hotel reservations open, that is the single busiest time of the year for Anthrocon’s webserver. In fact, it even caused us performance problems last year. That was not so good.

So this year, I decided to try something different. Instead of leaving the regular website up and running, which involves using Drupal, I instead decided to replace the entire page with a relatively static “countdown” page, which displayed a countdown timer and automatically started displaying the hotel link at 11 AM on the opening day.

First, some stats for the Anthrocon website:

Peak bandwidth: 1.6 Megabits/sec

Peak connections: 1,400 concurrent connections

And now some status for Passkey, who handled most of the traffic:

Peak bandwidth: 190 Megabits/sec

Peak connections: 4,000 concurrent connections

Tag: nginx

WordPress 5 in Docker with Nginx and LetsEncrypt

Scaling Anthrocon’s Website to Handle 1,400 Simultaneous Connections

The Challenge