This brief tutorial shows students and new users how to improve Nginx performance by mounting ngx_pagespeed, fastcgi_cache, or proxy_cache in RAM or memory with tmpfs.
Nowadays, everyone wants their websites to run faster. If you’re using Nginx with either of the caching modules above, mounting any of those cache pages in memory via tmpfs is smart.
By default, Nginx will store its cache data on a disk. Even if you’re using SSD disks, caches in RAM will still perform better than on disk.
If you have enough RAM on your server, one of the best optimization methods is mounting cache pages in RAM.
The steps below will get you started easily.
To get started, follow the steps below:
Find System Memory Usage
To find out if your system has enough RAM, one way is to run the commands below:
free -h
That should provide you with a snapshot of your system’s memory.
total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 15G 2.8G 9.5G 471M 3.3G 12G Swap: 0B 0B 0B
You’ll see the total memory available, how much is used, and free.
Create a tmpfs RAM Space
Now that you know the amount of memory available, continue below to create a directory that will be mounted in RAM.
Since by default Nginx uses /var/cache/nginx directory, it’s reasonable to create a directory there called ramcache.
Run the commands below to create a directory called ramcache in the /var/cache/nginx directory.
sudo mkdir -p /var/cache/nginx/ramcache
After creating the directory, use the tmpfs command to mount it in RAM
For this tutorial, we will use 2GB RAM storage. To create 2GB RAM storage, run the command below:
sudo mount -t tmpfs -o size=2G tmpfs /var/cache/nginx/ramcache
That will create RAM storage, but it’s not permanent.
You can safely unmount it using the commands below:
sudo umount /var/cache/nginx/ramcache
If you want the RAM storage to be permanent and always mount when the server reboots, run the commands below to open the /etc/fstab file
sudo nano /etc/fstab
Then copy the line below and append it to the bottom of the file.
sudo tmpfs /var/cache/nginx/ramcache tmpfs defaults,size=2G 0 0
Save the file and exit.
You have created mounted storage in RAM that can store Nginx caches.
Setup Nginx to Use the Storage
Now that the storage space is created, open the Nginx configuration and use the storage space created above.
Now, I don’t know how your Nginx cache is set up, by mine is like the one below:
fastcgi_cache_path /var/cache/nginx/ramcache/fastcgi_temp/ levels=1:2 keys_zone=cachezone:100m max_size=2g inactive=60m use_temp_path=off;
fastcgi_cache_key $scheme$request_method$host$request_uri;
fastcgi_cache_revalidate on;
fastcgi_cache_background_update on;
fastcgi_cache_use_stale error timeout invalid_header updating http_500;
fastcgi_ignore_headers Cache-Control Expires Set-Cookie;
Save the file and exit.
Restart Nginx
sudo systemctl reload nginx
Nginx will automatically use the mounted storage for the cache when you do that.
If you’re using PageSpeed Module, you’ll need to specify its cache location.
pagespeed EnableCachePurge on; pagespeed PurgeMethod PURGE; pagespeed ImplicitCacheTtlMs 31536000000; pagespeed FileCachePath "/var/cache/nginx/ramcache/ngx_pagespeed/"; pagespeed CreateSharedMemoryMetadataCache "/var/cache/nginx/ramcache/ngx_pagespeed/" 1000000; pagespeed DefaultSharedMemoryCacheKB 5000000;
That should do it!
Conclusion:
This post showed you how to set up the Nginx cache to use mounted RAM storage. If you find any error above, please use the comment form below to report.
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