Web Tuning

Gunicorn

Number of workers

The default installation will have 3 workers configured for Gunicorn. This will be fine on most systems, but if your system as more than one core than you might want to increase the number of workers to get better response times. Note that more workers will also need more RAM though.

The number you set this to will depend on your own server environment, how many visitors you have etc. Gunicorn suggests (2 x $num_cores) + 1 for the number of workers. So for example, if you have 2 cores, you want 2 x 2 + 1 = 5 workers. See How Many Workers for the official discussion on this topic.

To have 5 workers change the setting --workers=x to --workers=5 in your supervisor.conf file and then reload the supervisor with the following command to activate the change

systemctl restart supervisor

To have 5 workers change the setting --workers=x to --workers=5 in your supervisor.conf file and then reload the supervisor with the following command to activate the change

systemctl restart supervisor

To have 5 workers change the setting --workers=3 to --workers=5 in your docker-compose.yml file and then restart the container as follows

docker compose up -d

nginx

nginx repo

We can use the Nginx repositories for a slightly more cutting edge version of Nginx, with more features. Install it to enable the below features

https://nginx.org/en/linux_packages.html#Ubuntu

No package necessary, simply increase docker compose pull and docker compose up -d to update.

Brotli Compression

Brotli is a modern compression algorithm designed for the web. Use this with Pre-Compression and E2E Cloudflare compression for best results.

sudo apt update sudo apt install libnginx-mod-http-brotli-filter libnginx-mod-http-brotli-static

Pull a custom dockerfile

mkdir nginx
curl -o my-nginx/Dockerfile https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nginxinc/docker-nginx/master/modules/Dockerfile

Replace the nginx service in your docker-compose as follows

  nginx:
    build:
      context: ./nginx/
      args:
        ENABLED_MODULES: brotli
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./conf/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
      - static-volume:/var/www/myauth/static
    depends_on:
      - allianceauth_gunicorn
    logging:
      driver: "json-file"
      options:
        max-size: "10Mb"
        max-file: "5"

Modify your nginx.conf as follows

load_module modules/ngx_http_brotli_static_module.so;
load_module modules/ngx_http_brotli_filter_module.so;
...
http {
  ...
    server {
        ...
        location /static {
            ...
            brotli_static on;
            brotli_types application/javascript text/css font/woff2 image/png image/svg+xml font/woff image/gif;
            brotli_comp_level 11;
        }
        ...
        location / {
            ...
            brotli on;
            brotli_comp_level 4;
        }
    }
}

Staticfile Pre-Compression

We can use a small library to pre-compress staticfiles for Nginx to deliver.

pip install django-static-compress

Add the following lines to local.py

# Tuning / Compression
STORAGES = {
    "staticfiles": {
        "BACKEND": "static_compress.CompressedStaticFilesStorage",
    },
}

STATIC_COMPRESS_FILE_EXTS = ['js', 'css', 'woff2', 'png', 'svg', 'woff', 'gif']
STATIC_COMPRESS_METHODS = ['gz', 'br']
STATIC_COMPRESS_KEEP_ORIGINAL = True
STATIC_COMPRESS_MIN_SIZE_KB = 1

Cloudflare

Brotli E2E Compression

Soon to be turned on by default. Refer to https://developers.cloudflare.com/speed/optimization/content/brotli/enable/

In order for cloudflare to seamlessly pass on your brotli compressed pages (End to End), ensure minification, rocket loader and other features are off https://developers.cloudflare.com/speed/optimization/content/brotli/enable/#notes-about-end-to-end-compression. Else cloudflare will need to uncompress, modify, then recompress your pages.