Nginx – How many NGinx redirects is too many

nginxperformanceredirect

I'm working on a news centric website thats been around for years and is steadily accruing more and more page redirects. Currently we have around 375 redirects and are adding about 5-10 a month.

I know that NGinx is very, very fast at handling redirects, but presumably there must be some number of redirects that will affect performance in a meaningful way, and I would feel better if I knew how many that would be. Hundreds? Thousands? Millions?

We are able to handle large volumes of traffic by caching popular pages for a minute or two at a time in Memcached (reducing load on our database, the obvious bottleneck), but NGinx still has to route that traffic.

Is this something I should be at all concerned about? How many redirects is too many for a high traffic website?

[originally posted at StackOverflow]

Best Answer

A redirect is not really a problem as there's no backend being contacted. Just Nginx. And Just Nginx is really, really fast. As in 10,000+ connections per second fast

You should probably worry more about a cluttered configuration file before you worry about if Nginx can handle it.

As a bonus, I was recently working on a full page caching solution with Nginx and I used Memcached as well, a neat trick to improve performance some is to use the upstream keepalive module to keep your connections open.

It only works with Memcached backends, though, so don't use it with any sort of fastcgi or HTTP proxying.

Correct way in new versions of nginx

Turn out my first answer to this question was correct at certain time, but it turned into another pitfall - to stay up to date please check Taxing rewrite pitfalls

I have been corrected by many SE users, so the credit goes to them, but more importantly, here is the correct code:

server {
       listen         80;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       return         301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

server {
       listen         443 ssl;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       # add Strict-Transport-Security to prevent man in the middle attacks
       add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000" always; 

       [....]
}

Nginx, too many redirects, err_too_many_redirects

ANSWER:

I made the mistake of not removing the wildcard "*" from the nginx.conf file path statement that points to the directory (or in this case with the wildcard DIRECTORIES) used for the site configurations...~thus the error(s) I was given at reload time pointing to a line item error was actually in one of the other conf files and NOT my "default" conf file.

Silly silly mistake!

Solution: Replace the wildcard "*" from the end of the "include.." path statement in nginx.conf and instead use the actual folder/file name ONLY.

Ex: include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*.conf;

REPLACE WITH: include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default; # or whatever your filename is.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

NGINX Redirect – How to Rewrite All HTTP Requests to HTTPS While Maintaining Sub-Domain

Correct way in new versions of nginx

Nginx, too many redirects, err_too_many_redirects

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