Nginx – How well do nginx and memcached work together

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We have a Java EE-based web application running on a Glassfish app server cluster. The incoming traffic will mainly be RESTful requests for XML-based representations of our application resources, but perhaps 5% of the traffic might be for JSON- or XHTML/CSS-based representations.

We're now investigating load-balancing solutions to distribute incoming traffic across the Glassfish instances in the cluster. We're also looking into how to offload the cluster using memcached, an in-memory distributed hash map whose keys would be the REST resource names (eg, "/user/bob", "/group/jazzlovers") and whose values are the corresponding XML representations.

One approach that sounds promising is to kill both birds with one stone and use the lightweight, fast nginx HTTP server/reverse proxy. Nginx would handle each incoming request by first looking its URI up in memcached to see if there's an unexpired XML representation already there. If not, nginx sends the request on to one of the Glassfish instances. The nginx memcached module is described in this short writeup.

What is your overall impression with nginx and memcached used this way, how happy are you with them? What resources did you find most helpful for learning about them? If you tried them and they didn't suit your purposes, why not, and what did you use instead?

Note: here's a related question. Before I knew about ServerFault I asked this on StackOverflow.

Edit: All the answers here so far have been quite helpful, though there was no direct experience. This answer did eventually show up over on StackOverflow, and it was quite bullish on the nginx/memcached setup.

Best Answer

You really should use a cache server in front of your web servers. I recommend Varnish-cache. We use it at work with the largest and busiest website in scandinavia. We replaced 13 highly loaded Squid boxes with 1 Varnish box, and 1 for spare.

I benchmarked a simple app on my private website, and it went from 9 requests a sec to over 2000.

You decide how long it keeps things in memory, you can do a till the end of time and then just send a http purge request to the cache server when the data changes.

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