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How can I prevent Nginx from buffering the output of my uwsgi app? For my comet style application I'm using long polling and the requests are now buffered.

I tried to reduce the size of the buffers, but I'm not allowed to put uwsgi_buffer_size and uwsgi_buffers on 0. Also uwsgi_max_temp_file_size does not work (eventhough the manual suggests that).

How can I do this?

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4 Answers 4

up vote 9 down vote accepted

Until a few minutes ago this was not possible. nginx would always buffer all uwsgi and scgi responses, and no configuration would change that.

I have submitted a patch for nginx (and it was accepted) and from the next version on there are two methods to disable buffering for uwsgi requests:

  • put uwsgi_buffering off in the nginx config
  • send a X-Accel-Buffering 'no' header in the response

uwsgi never buffers the response, so no configuration is required on that end.

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Why don't you use the uwsgi-embedded http-router/load-balancer directly ? It does no-buffering expecially for comet/websockets app. You can use nginx for static files mapping them to another domain.

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In that case I could also http proxy the requests through nginx, as for proxying there are specific buffering flags. The thing I'm doubting is that uwsgi http server is able to give me a good performance and security. –  Peter Smit Aug 4 '11 at 8:55

Try with uwsgi_max_temp_file_size = 0

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As I wrote in the question, this does not work. –  Peter Smit Aug 3 '11 at 3:03

Nginx "proxy" module has a directive for that, it's called proxy_buffering on|off, which does exactly what you want, it turns buffering off and proxies upstream output synchronously. But AFAIK neither FastCGI nor UWSGI modules have it.

BTW even when proxy_buffering is off, you may notice small delays because of OS TCP stack buffering.

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Indeed, if I would use proxy_pass then this would be useful. But as I mentioned I use uwsgi so this does not work. –  Peter Smit Aug 4 '11 at 10:33
Ok, I'll tell you plainly: there is no solution. Is downvoting your motivation for people? Good luck. –  Alexander Azarov Aug 4 '11 at 14:08
Please don't take the downvote personal. A downvote means "This answer is not useful". So I downvoted it as it was not useful to me, because it does not give an answer to my question. –  Peter Smit Aug 4 '11 at 16:43

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