As we move more sites to an Nginx/Passenger server stack, we need to translate the server-side optimizations we use for browser-side performance from Apache configuration to Nginx. Here’s how that comes over:
Gzip compression
In Nginx, this is an optional module which should be built in to the software at compile time. If it’s present, you can activate it in site configuration with a block like this:
gzip on; gzip_min_length 1100; gzip_buffers 4 8k; gzip_proxied any; gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
Note that Nginx considers text/xml and text/html to be redundant MIME types.
Long expiration dates
We want to have our assets cached in the user’s browser cache as long as possible, with a few exceptions (e.g. advertising assets.) To that end, we set expiration headers:
location ~* \.(js|css|jpg|jpeg|gif|png)$ {
if (-f $request_filename) {
expires max;
break;
}
}
This uses the filename extension to determine which files get “far future” expiration dates. If you’re used to naming files without extensions, this might not work so well for you.
By default, Nginx doesn’t use Etags, so we can stop worrying about that.
