is it ok to use ktor as a reverse proxy for static content? any drawbacks?

# ktor

[enleur]

is it ok to use ktor as a reverse proxy for static content? any drawbacks?

[Deactivated User]

It should be ok.
But if it is just for that I would use nginx instead.

[enleur]

it’s going to be as a smart gateway with complex routing and app firewall for downstream services

[Deactivated User]

If you cannot define the routing with nginx easily, you can consider using ktor indeed. But you have to know that there is a overhead. Ktor uses the JVM that has a GC and additional overhead while nginx is written in C and doesn’t have that overhead.

[Deactivated User]

The best thing you can do is to do a benchmark to decide. If you can scale horizontally without too much trouble and you prefer ease to performance, it should be ok.

[Deactivated User]

Iirc, nginx supported headers for reverse proxying for serving files directly. So you generate a header in your backend that was reverse-proxied by nginx, and nginx served the file without the overhead including range support. Maybe there is a header to reverse-proxy another backend, so you can generate a URL in your backend in a header, and instruct nginx to reverse-proxy it without any overhead. So you can define the logic in your backend and nginx do all the heavy work.
Let me check if there is such header

[Deactivated User]

For files, it is X-Accel-Redirect (similar to XSendFile): https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/examples/xsendfile/

Now let’s check if it allows to do something to reverse-proxy an url too

[Deactivated User]

https://kovyrin.net/2010/07/24/nginx-fu-x-accel-redirect-remote/
<-- I think this should do

[Deactivated User]

and if you want to keep it simple, you can do it with ktor too, but I would do a PoC to see if the performance is good enough for you. You can also report us feedback about performance and we can try to improve it

[enleur]

yeah, looks good. should I also use nginx for regular web ktor applications to serve static content?

[Deactivated User]

Not required. In my case for example, I have docker and I use a companion container with nginx that handles certificates and domains and reverse-proxy each website using the domain

[Deactivated User]

And in that case, I guess you can configure nginx to cache your static resources based on some headers

[Deactivated User]

From example an etag. So you can serve normally with ktor, and further optimize it later if required with an nginx

[Deactivated User]

I usually try to not do premature optimizations related to that, to keep things simple, but I understand that some use-cases might require special performance, so that’s why I suggested you to use nginx if you are not going to have too much logic

[enleur]

in this case I think it is better to serve content with CDN. ok, i’ll try to do it with ktor