Maximize your concurrent web server connections
For production web servers, most people assume scaling means needing faster (and more expensive) hardware. Before spending more money on servers, first make sure your web server process is using the maximum available connections supported by your Linux kernel. There are 3 layers you need to check and configure:
This becomes really useful when your web server isn’t bottlenecked by RAM or CPU. For ex, when using HAProxy to load balance Nginx web servers. HAProxy isn’t processing the request and uses almost no CPU, but it needs to handle a large amount of concurrent connections. Increasing the file-max is also beneficial for production Nginx, Apache, and even your Redis and Postgres database servers.
Each Linux kernel supports a certain maximum number of open files (or sockets) per process. From now on, we’ll call that file-max. To check the kernel’s current file-max, run:
You won’t ever be able to use those 9T concurrent connections. That’s because each open connection uses around 1k RAM, and DigitalOcean doesn’t offer any instance with that much RAM.
