NGINX Internal Architecture - Workers | The Backend Engineering Show

This episode explores the internal architecture of NGINX, a high-performance web server. The speaker begins by outlining the master process and worker processes, explaining how the latter are spun up based on the number of hardware threads available. More significantly, the discussion delves into connection management, detailing how connections are handled through SYN queues and accept queues within the kernel, and how worker processes pick up these connections. For instance, the speaker explains the complexities of connection selection and load balancing between worker processes. Against this backdrop of intricate kernel interactions, the episode highlights the crucial role of CPU-bound and IO-bound operations in processing requests, emphasizing the importance of minimizing context switching for optimal performance. The speaker concludes by summarizing how NGINX handles numerous concurrent connections, distributing them efficiently across worker processes to ensure responsiveness. This detailed explanation provides valuable insights into the performance optimization strategies employed in high-throughput web servers.