See if later version of Nginx can easily be installed with wheezy-backports

[geerlingguy]

As part of #17, I added the wheezy-backports apt repo to the balancer.yml playbook. I'd like to see if, like is explained in Installing Nginx Using the Debian Wheezy Backports Package, I can install a newer version than the (relatively outdated 1.2.1) version that comes with Wheezy's core repos.

[geerlingguy]

It can... but still working out the automation of using the wheezy-backports option. A change to my geerlingguy.nginx role will be required. Opened upstream ticket: geerlingguy/ansible-role-nginx#13

[geerlingguy]

1.6.2 not only lets us configure load balancing a lot better, it gives a slight speed bump; average capacity is now solidly over 1500 req/s on the balancer, and latency is slightly lower. Nice!

$ ab -n 10000 -c 100 http://pidramble.com/about
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1554214 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking pidramble.com (be patient)
Completed 1000 requests
Completed 2000 requests
Completed 3000 requests
Completed 4000 requests
Completed 5000 requests
Completed 6000 requests
Completed 7000 requests
Completed 8000 requests
Completed 9000 requests
Completed 10000 requests
Finished 10000 requests


Server Software:        nginx/1.6.2
Server Hostname:        pidramble.com
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /about
Document Length:        5751 bytes

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   6.612 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      67990000 bytes
HTML transferred:       57510000 bytes
Requests per second:    1512.32 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       66.123 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.661 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          10041.30 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        5   32   3.5     32      44
Processing:     8   34   2.9     34      69
Waiting:        8   33   2.9     33      69
Total:         14   66   3.5     66      88

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     66
  66%     66
  75%     67
  80%     67
  90%     68
  95%     68
  98%     71
  99%     78
 100%     88 (longest request)

[geerlingguy]

Also seeing ~9.7 req/s on uncached page loads. A marginal improvement, to be sure, but an improvement nonetheless! Marking this as closed once I commit the fixes.