TheNitai

Nginx is our favorite web server currently as it is fast, lean and easy to configure. Performance is just outstanding and if you haven’t take a look at it.

One thing that I noticed while we deployed Nginx with Tomcat is that their default size for the buffers are very low. Don’t know why a 4K buffer size would be sufficient. If you keep it at their default size and might have a heavy duty Tomcat app then it could be that you will see error messages like:

upstream sent too big header while reading response header from upstream

The remedy for this error is to set the parameters for higher values for the proxy_buffer* parameters as we have done and now all is back to normal. Here are the current settings that worked well for us;

proxy_buffer_size   128k;
proxy_buffers   4 256k;
proxy_busy_buffers_size   256k;

Usually, I’m a happy camper with my MacOS X and with the built in applications (not that I use them a lot, but when I do I like how well they are built and “feel”). The only application I use a lot of the built in applications is Apple Mail.

Lately, Apple Mail, has been acting up a lot. As such, that when it tried to sync with my mail server it just hang up and sucked in all available CPU and my MacBook was heating up like anything. The only remedy was to Force Quit Apple Mail (if you don’t know, just press the “Apple Key (cmd) & Alt (option) & Esc and you get a handy dialog to force quit any running application).

How I got my Apple Mail running healthy again? Here are the following steps I did;

1. Repair Permissions
   Actually, repairing permission should be done at least once a month. It just keeps your system healthy and rules out any problems. What “Repair Permissions” does, is to simply correct all permissions on files that system owns and needs to run smoothly. To repair permissions lunch the Disk Utility application, select your startup disk and click on “Repair Permissions”.
2. Remove the cache files of Apple Mail
   If you see a problem with syncing and updating the cache directory within Mail it could be that the cache files are corrupt. Go to your home Library folder, then to the Mail folder and remove the “DefaultCounts”, “Envelope Index” and the “LSMMap” files. Some have reported that removing the “MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded3″ as well. So you will have to experiment a bit.

The next time you start up Apple Mail it should ask you to reimport all messages and it will rebuilt the index. Hopefully, you are back up and all is well.