Nginx does use more ram for the number of vhosts than Apache does

http://nginx.org/en/docs/control.html

The USR2 is for binary in-place upgrades and normally you should just send
a SIGHUP, I have seen sometimes the USR2 leading multiple master process
and showing some weird behaviour

You can probably use worker_shutdown_timeout 10s; or something to get the
workers to shut down in a more timebound manner



On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 12:03 AM wkbrad <nginx-forum@forum.nginx.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I just wanted to share the details of what I've found about this issue.
> Also thanks to Maxim Dounin and Reinis Rozitis who gave some really great
> answers!
>
> The more I look into this the more I'm convinced this is an issue with
> Nginx
> itself. I've tested this with 3 different builds now and all have the
> exact
> same issue.
>
> The first 2 types of servers I tested were both running Nginx 1.15.8 on
> Centos 7 ( with 1 of them being on 6 ). I tested about 10 of our over 100
> servers. This time I tested in a default install of Debian 9 with Nginix
> version 1.10.3 and the issue exists there too. I just wanted to test on
> something completely different.
>
> For the test, I created 50k very simple vhosts which used about 1G of RAM.
> Here is the ps_mem output.
> 94.3 MiB + 1.0 GiB = 1.1 GiB nginx (3)
>
> After a normal reload it then uses 2x the ram:
> 186.3 MiB + 1.9 GiB = 2.1 GiB nginx (3)
>
> And if I reload it again it briefly jumps up to about 4G during the reload
> and then goes back down to 2G.
>
> If I instead use the "upgrade" option. In the case of Debian, service
> nginx
> upgrade, then it reloads gracefully and goes back to using 1G again.
> 100.8 MiB + 1.0 GiB = 1.1 GiB nginx (3)
>
> The difference between the "reload" and "upgrade" process is basically only
> that reload sends a HUP signal to Nginx and upgrade sends a USR2 and then
> QUIT signal. What happens with all of those signals is entirely up to
> Nginx. It could even ignore them if chose too.
>
> Additionally, I ran the same test with Apache. Not because I want to
> compare Nginx to Apache, they are different for a reason. I just wanted to
> test if this was a system issue. So I did the same thing on Debian 9,
> installed Apache and created 50k simple vhosts. It used about 800M of ram
> and reloading did not cause that to increase at all.
>
> All of that leads me to these questions.
>
> Why would anyone want to use the normal reload process to reload the Nginx
> configuration?
> Shouldn't we always be using the upgrade process instead?
> Are there any downsides to doing that?
> Has anyone else noticed these issues and have you found another fix?
>
> Look forward to hearing back and thanks in advance!
>
> Posted at Nginx Forum:
> https://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,283216,283309#msg-283309
>
> _______________________________________________
> nginx mailing list
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> http://mailman.nginx.org/mailman/listinfo/nginx
>


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