Nginx + Unicorn : difference between both worker_processes

Question

I have a rails app running on a Nginx + Unicorn environnement

I see that both have a "worker_processes" in their config file and I wonder what is the optimal configuration

If I have 4 cores, should I put 4 for both? Or 1 for nginx and 4 for unicorn?

(by the way, I am using sidekiq too, so what about sidekiq concurrency?)

Answer 1

The general rule of thumb is to use one worker process per core that your server has. So setting worker_processes 4; would be optimal in your scenario for both nginx and Unicorn config files, as given by example here:

nginx.conf

 # One worker process per CPU core is a good guideline.
 worker_processes 1;

unicorn.rb

# The number of worker processes you have here should equal the number of CPU
# cores your server has.
worker_processes (ENV['RAILS_ENV'] == 'production' ? 4 : 1)

More information on the Sidekiq concurrency can be found here:

You can tune the amount of concurrency in your sidekiq process. By default, one sidekiq process creates 25 threads. If that's crushing your machine with I/O, you can adjust it down:
sidekiq -c 10
Don't set the concurrency higher than 50. I've seen stability issues with concurrency of 100, for example. Note that ActiveRecord has a connection pool which needs to be properly configured in config/database.yml to work well with heavy concurrency. Set the pool setting to something close or equal to the number of threads:
production: adapter: mysql2 database: foo_production pool: 25

Answer 2

There is no absolute best answer. (If there was, the software would tune itself automatically.)

It all depends on your operating system, environment, processor, memory, discs, buffer cache of the OS, caching policy in nginx, hit rates, application, and probably many other factors, of what would be the best possible solution.

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Which, not very surprisingly, is actually what the documentation of nginx says, too:

http://nginx.org/r/worker_processes

The optimal value depends on many factors including (but not limited to) the number of CPU cores, the number of hard disk drives that store data, and load pattern. When one is in doubt, setting it to the number of available CPU cores would be a good start (the value “auto” will try to autodetect it).

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As for unicorn, a quick search for "worker_processes unicorn" reveals the following as the first hit:

http://bogomips.org/unicorn/TUNING.html

• worker_processes should be scaled to the number of processes your backend system(s) can support. DO NOT scale it to the number of external network clients your application expects to be serving. unicorn is NOT for serving slow clients, that is the job of nginx.

• worker_processes should be scaled to the number of processes your backend system(s) can support. DO NOT scale it to the number of external network clients your application expects to be serving. unicorn is NOT for serving slow clients, that is the job of nginx.

• worker_processes should be at least the number of CPU cores on a dedicated server (unless you do not have enough memory). If your application has occasionally slow responses that are /not/ CPU-intensive, you may increase this to workaround those inefficiencies.

…

• Never, ever, increase worker_processes to the point where the system runs out of physical memory and hits swap. Production servers should never see heavy swap activity.

https://bogomips.org/unicorn/Unicorn/Configurator.html#method-i-worker_processes

sets the current number of #worker_processes to nr. Each worker process will serve exactly one client at a time. You can increment or decrement this value at runtime by sending SIGTTIN or SIGTTOU respectively to the master process without reloading the rest of your Unicorn configuration. See the SIGNALS document for more information.

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In summary:

• for nginx, it is best to keep it at or below the number of CPUs (and I'd probably not count the hyperthreading ones, especially if you have other stuff running on the same server) and/or discs,

• whereas for unicorn, it looks like, it probably has to be at least the number of CPUs, plus, if you have sufficient memory, and depending on your workload, you may possibly want to increase it much further than the raw number of the CPUs

Answer 3

Nginx

Nginx is event based server. It means that 1 operation system (OS) process can manage very big number of connections. It's possible, because usual state of connections is wait. While connection waiting for other side or sending/receiving packet of data - nginx can process with other connections. One nginx worker can work with thousands or even tens of thousands connections. So, even worker_processes 1 can be enough.

More nginx's workers allow to use more CPU cores (that can be important if nginx is the main CPU eater). More workers also good if nginx doing lot of disk IO.

Resume: you can safe start from 1 worker and increase to number of CPU cores.

Unicorn

Worker of Unicorn is little bit different from nginx because one worker = one request. Number of unicorn workers show how many ruby processes will execute same time. And this number depends on your application.

For example, you application is CPU bound (doing some math only). In this case number of workers greater than number of CPU cores can cause problems.

But usual application work with some databases and sleep while wait for database answer. If our database placed on other server (request processing do not eat our CPU) - ruby will sleep and CPU idle. In this case we can increase number of workers to CPU*3... CPU*5 or even CPU*20 workers.

Resume: Best way to find this number - load testing of your real application. Set number of unicorn workers, start load testing with the same number of concurrency. If server feels good - increase number of workers and test again.

Sidekiq

Concurrency of sidekiq similar to unicorn workers. If tasks is CPU bound - set number of treads close to number of CPU. If I/O bound - number of thread can be greater than number of CPU cores. Also, other tasks of this server is important (like unicorn). Just remember, that number of CPU cores do not change if you will run sidekiq on same server with unicorn :)

Resume: same as unicorn.