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I'm working on a configuration for a reverse proxy that's only purpose is to load balance requests between two upstream servers, primarily for redundancy in case one goes down.

I'm curious about the affect of proxy_buffering, described here.

I'm load balancing requests for large video files, where the largest and most commonly requested "chunk" of a video is around 2.5 Megabytes. Our CDN makes requests for these videos using byte-rages. The video files are much larger than that.

The default for proxy_buffering is that it's enabled. My questions are:

  1. What is the benefit for nginx buffering the response from the proxied server? It must have some value if (a) it's an option and (b) it's turned on by default.
  2. Does it make sense to disable it in my case? Where the requested data is typically quite large?
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I think proxy_buffering is only useful in some cases. For example it avoids keeping a connection open between nginx and upstream when the connection between nginx and the client is slow.

However, I'm not sure turning it off would significantly improve performance, even in your case.

A less radical change than disabling proxy_buffering could be setting proxy_max_temp_file_size 0 to make sure performance doesn't get hurt by disk IO.

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