#pingora

Stop Clinging to Nginx. Cloudflare Dumped It for a Reason.

Let’s be completely honest: running massive global internet traffic through a legacy C-based proxy is just begging for memory leaks and segmentation faults. Cloudflare realized this, ditched Nginx entirely, and built Pingora—a memory-safe, hyper-fast proxy framework written natively in Rust.

But here is the reality check. Pingora isn't just a simple apt-get install drop-in replacement. You can't just copy-paste your old .conf files.

At ServerMO, we just dropped the definitive SRE playbook on how to actually engineer, compile, and deploy Pingora on unthrottled bare metal hardware. If you are migrating to Rust, you need to fix these structural traps first:

The Tokio Threading Trap: Asynchronous Rust uses "work-stealing" by default. On a massive 32-core bare metal server, this creates brutal lock contention. You have to manually disable work-stealing in your code to force a highly efficient "shared-nothing" model.

The Cache Stampede Nightmare: Unbounded memory caches will instantly cause an Out-Of-Memory (OOM) kernel panic as traffic scales. You must enforce strict capacity limits and use Pingora’s request coalescing to lock down thundering herds (suspending duplicate requests until the first one fetches the data).

The File Descriptor Mismatch: Tunneling traffic through another proxy? If you don't perfectly align your physical socket addresses with your logical SNI strings, Pingora’s security protocols will violently terminate your connections.

Killing the Nginx Reload Spikes: Nginx "graceful reloads" still force the OS to spawn entirely new worker processes, eating your RAM and CPU. Pingora uses thread-safe read-write locks for true in-memory atomic hot-swapping. Zero new processes. Zero latency drops.

Stop fighting legacy C code. Build your edge gateway in Rust and deploy it on dedicated hardware that actually gives you the unshared compute power for millions of async TLS handshakes.

pingora