Nginx

Inside NGINX: How We Designed for Performance & Scale

SSO with Nginx auth_request module

SSO with Nginx auth_request module – SSO as in Single Sign-On. Absolutely beautiful solution for one set of requirements, and a horrendous for another. Worth knowing though.

Nginx and Memcached, a 400% boost!

Here is an idea to try on a slow weekend: Nginx and Memcached, a 400% boost!

Memcached, the darling of every web-developer, is capable of turning almost any application into a speed-demon. Benchmarking one of my own Rails applications resulted in ~850 req/s on commodity, non-optimized hardware – more than enough in the case of this application. However, what if we took Mongrel out of the equation? Nginx, by default, comes prepackaged with the Memcached module, which allows us to bypass the Mongrel servers and talk to Memcached directly. Same hardware, and a quick test later: ~3,550 req/s, or almost a 400% improvement! Not bad for a five minute tweak!

Nginx and SPDY

I just popped my SPDY cherry. And with Nginx too. Looking at a shiny A+ rating from SSL Labs for a project that is about to go live…

The Heartbleed Bug

If you haven’t heard about The Heartbleed Bug yet, here is your chance. This page describes it nicely in not too technical detail. Let’s get a few quotes to get you started:

The Heartbleed Bug is a serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library. This weakness allows stealing the information protected, under normal conditions, by the SSL/TLS encryption used to secure the Internet. SSL/TLS provides communication security and privacy over the Internet for applications such as web, email, instant messaging (IM) and some virtual private networks (VPNs).

The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content. This allows attackers to eavesdrop on communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users.

That doesn’t just sound nasty. IT IS!

Continue reading The Heartbleed Bug