Nginx Port Exhaustion: Causes, Diagnostics, and Fixes

Introduction Port exhaustion is a pernicious, often misunderstood failure mode that can bring a high-traffic Nginx deployment to its knees. The symptoms are intermittent and confusing—spiky 5xx error rates, “Cannot assign requested address” in logs, and upstream timeouts—yet the root cause is usually simple: you ran out of usable ephemeral ports for outbound connections. In this article, we’ll explain what port exhaustion is and why Nginx is especially prone to it in reverse-proxy scenarios. We’ll cover how to diagnose it accurately, provide practical fixes at the Nginx and OS levels, and offer architectural strategies to prevent it from recurring. Whether you’re running bare metal, in containers, or behind a cloud NAT gateway, this guide will help you understand and solve Nginx port exhaustion. ...

December 12, 2025 · 10 min · 2095 words · martinuke0

Nginx from Zero to Hero: An In-Depth Tutorial and Guide

Nginx is one of the most popular open-source web servers in the world, widely used not only to serve static content but also as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTP cache. This comprehensive tutorial will guide you step-by-step from the basics of installing Nginx to configuring advanced features, helping you become proficient in managing and optimizing it for your projects. Table of Contents Introduction to Nginx Installing Nginx Understanding Nginx Architecture Basic Configuration and Serving Static Content Configuring Reverse Proxy and Load Balancing Optimizing Nginx Performance Setting Up HTTPS with SSL/TLS Advanced Configurations and Use Cases Useful Commands for Managing Nginx Further Resources Conclusion Introduction to Nginx Nginx (pronounced “Engine-X”) is a high-performance web server designed to handle many concurrent connections efficiently. Unlike traditional web servers, it uses an event-driven, asynchronous architecture, which makes it well suited for high-traffic websites and applications. ...

December 5, 2025 · 5 min · 939 words · martinuke0
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