Hello!

On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 02:54:41PM -0400, wkbrad wrote:

> Combine all of that with the fact that this issue happens on all systems and
> that the direct competitor doesn't have this issue, that makes me think this
> is something that Nginx needs to address directly.

If by "direct competitor" you mean Apache you've previously
mentioned in this thread, note that:

- Apache doesn't try to provide a safe configuration reload, and
will be in an unusable state if something goes wrong while
loading the new configuration (not to mention that Apache can't do
a configuration reload while processing ongoing requests at the
same time, and instead pauses all processing till reload is
complete). This is not something nginx can afford, and hence we
do it differently. While our approach may need more memory, this
is something we are ready to pay to make sure no requests will be
lost.

- And, really, nginx and Apache are not direct competitors. If
Apache works for you - use it, it is a reputable server we all
love and use or used in the past. Though it doesn't scale good
enough to thousands of connections, and that's why nginx was
written in the first place. And it also cannot handle upgrades
and configuration reloads seamlessly, so it cannot be used as a
frontend server on loaded sites unless you have a way to direct
traffic to a different server. Nevertheless, even on loaded sites
Apache can be (and often is) used as a backend server behind
nginx, and it does this just fine.

What nginx does to keep configuration reloads seamless certainly
require additional resources, but this is something we do for a
good reason. And this particular problem is relatively easy to
mitigate by keeping a configuration small (the other side of the
problem is that you anyway need about 2x memory on the server,
including various client-related buffers, so nginx will be able to
start two sets of worker processes during the configuration
reload, and this is something you can't mitigate at all; the good
part is that this memory is not wasted but used for page cache
between reloads). Also, if you really think this is a major
problem, you may want to start working on improving system
allocators to handle this better, it is something certainly
possible.

--
Maxim Dounin
http://mdounin.ru/
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