nginx proxy to comet

Question

I need some help from some linux gurus. I am working on a webapp that includes a comet server. The comet server runs on localhost:8080 and exposes the url localhost:8080/long_polling for clients to connect to. My webapp runs on localhost:80.

I've used nginx to proxy requests from nginx to the comet server (localhost:80/long_polling proxied to localhost:8080/long_polling), however, I have two gripes with this solution:

1. nginx gives me a 504 Gateway time-out after a minute, even though I changed EVERY single time out setting to 600 seconds
2. I don't really want nginx to have to proxy to the comet server anyway - the nginx proxy is not built for long lasting connections (up to half an hour possibly). I would rather allow the clients to directly connect to the comet server, and let the comet server deal with it.

So my question is: is there any linux trick that allows me to expose localhost:8080/long_polling to localhost:80/long_polling without using the nginx proxy? There must be something. That's why I think this question can probably be best answered by a linux guru.

The reason I need /long_polling to be exposed on port 80 is so I can use AJAX to connect to it (ajax same-origin-policy).

This is my nginx proxy.conf for reference:

proxy_redirect              off;                                                                                                                         
proxy_set_header            Host $host;
proxy_set_header            X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header            X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
client_max_body_size        10m;
client_body_buffer_size     128k;
proxy_connect_timeout       600;
proxy_send_timeout          600;
proxy_read_timeout          600;
proxy_buffer_size           4k;
proxy_buffers               4 32k;
proxy_busy_buffers_size     64k;
proxy_temp_file_write_size  64k;
send_timeout                600;
proxy_buffering             off;

Answer 1

Here's my nginx.conf and my proxy.conf. Note however that the proxy.conf is way overkill - I was just setting all these settings while trying to debug my program.

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf

worker_processes  1;                                                                                                                                     
user www-data;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log debug;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include /etc/nginx/proxy.conf;

    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log;

    sendfile        on;
    tcp_nopush     on;

    keepalive_timeout  600;
    tcp_nodelay        on;

    gzip  on;
    gzip_comp_level 2;
    gzip_proxied any;
    gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

/etc/nginx/proxy.conf

proxy_redirect              off;                                                                                                                         
proxy_set_header            Host $host;
proxy_set_header            X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header            X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
client_max_body_size        10m;
client_body_buffer_size     128k;
proxy_connect_timeout       6000;
proxy_send_timeout          6000;
proxy_read_timeout          6000;
proxy_buffer_size           4k;
proxy_buffers               4 32k;
proxy_busy_buffers_size     64k;
proxy_temp_file_write_size  64k;
send_timeout                6000;
proxy_buffering             off;
proxy_next_upstream error;