Nginx memory usage with SSL

The Nginx changelog for the 1.0.9 release (on November 1, 2011) had a single line note tucked away inside:

*) Feature: decrease of memory consumption if SSL is used.

It turns out two small tweaks made this possible: disabling SSL compression and releasing unneeded SSL buffers.

So why am I even blogging about this? This site surely isn’t big enough to have this really make a difference, but the before and after on the graph of Nginx memory usage on the Arch Linux forums and wiki server is rather astounding, a site that does only HTTPS. If you use Nginx + SSL, I’d highly recommend upgrading.

See Also

• Making things IPv6 capable - June 8, 2011
• Linux command of the day: slabtop - July 7, 2011
• Handy command line tool of the day: csplit - January 4, 2011
• OpenVPN and ATA over Ethernet (AoE) interaction - February 25, 2013
• MySQL and /tmp on tmpfs - April 30, 2012