nginx.conf Improvements/Corrections

Don't think it makes sense to turn this off for a single worker and it's on by default.

The docs indicate that Nginx will use the best method based on the available methods

Keepalive of 5 seems very low - i've seen recommendations of 10-20

gzip_proxied was set twice

gzip_static should be off unless actually used

default is deprecated

server_name _; shouldn't be used

Shoudn't use expires in the server {} block - should be inside location {}

Extra root lines not needed

gzip_comp_level seems too low

gzip_min_length seems too high

nginx.conf

@@ -19,16 +19,6 @@ events {
   # your OS, and this is probably the point at where you hire people
   # who are smarter than you, this is *a lot* of requests.
   worker_connections  8000;
-
-  # This sets up some smart queueing for accept(2)'ing requests
-  # Set it to "on" if you have > worker_processes
-  accept_mutex off;
-
-  # These settings are OS specific, by defualt Nginx uses select(2),
-  # however, for a large number of requests epoll(2) and kqueue(2)
-  # are generally faster than the default (select(2))
-  # use epoll; # enable for Linux 2.6+
-  # use kqueue; # enable for *BSD (FreeBSD, OS X, ..)
 }
 
 # Change these paths to somewhere that suits you!
@@ -52,7 +42,7 @@ http {
 
   # ~2 seconds is often enough for HTML/CSS, but connections in
   # Nginx are cheap, so generally it's safe to increase it
-  keepalive_timeout  5;
+  keepalive_timeout 20;
 
   # You usually want to serve static files with Nginx
   sendfile on;
@@ -60,12 +50,12 @@ http {
   tcp_nopush on; # off may be better for Comet/long-poll stuff
   tcp_nodelay off; # on may be better for Comet/long-poll stuff
 
-  # Enable Gzip
-  gzip  on;
+  # Enable Gzip:
+  gzip on;
   gzip_http_version 1.0;
-  gzip_comp_level 2;
-  gzip_min_length 1100;
-  gzip_buffers     4 8k;
+  gzip_comp_level 5;
+  gzip_min_length 512;
+  gzip_buffers 4 8k;
   gzip_proxied any;
   gzip_types
     # text/html is always compressed by HttpGzipModule
@@ -83,20 +73,23 @@ http {
     application/vnd.ms-fontobject
     image/svg+xml;
 
-  gzip_static on;
+  # This should be turned on if you are going to have pre-compressed copies (.gz) of
+  # static files available. If not it should be left off as it will cause extra I/O
+  # for the check. It would be better to enable this in a location {} block for
+  # a specific directory:
+  # gzip_static on;
 
-  gzip_proxied        expired no-cache no-store private auth;
   gzip_disable        "MSIE [1-6]\.";
   gzip_vary           on;
 
   server {
-    # listen 80 default deferred; # for Linux
-    # listen 80 default accept_filter=httpready; # for FreeBSD
-    listen 80 default;
+    # listen 80 default_server deferred; # for Linux
+    # listen 80 default_server accept_filter=httpready; # for FreeBSD
+    listen 80 default_server;
 
     # e.g. "localhost" to accept all connections, or "www.example.com"
     # to handle the requests for "example.com" (and www.example.com)
-    server_name _;
+    # server_name www.example.com;
 
     # Path for static files
     root /sites/example.com/public;
@@ -104,26 +97,15 @@ http {
     # Custom 404 page
     error_page 404 /404.html;
 
-    # This is pretty long expiry and assume your using
-    # cachebusting with query params like
-    #   <script src="application.js?20110529">
-    #
-    # Just be careful if your using this on a frequently
-    # updated static site. You may want to crank this back
-    # to 5m which is 5 minutes.
-    expires 1M; # yes one month
-
     # Static assets
     location ~* ^.+\.(manifest|appcache)$ {
       expires -1;
-      root   /sites/example.com/public;
       access_log logs/static.log;
     }
 
-    # Set expires max on static file types
+    # Set expires max on static file types (make sure you are using cache busting filenames or query params):
     location ~* ^.+\.(css|js|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|gz|svg|svgz|ttf|otf|woff|eot|mp4|ogg|ogv|webm)$ {
       expires max;
-      root   /sites/example.com/public;
       access_log off;
     }