Nginx + passenger serving 4 requests/s for a static page

Question

I deployed my app to Digitalocean with Passenger and Nginx. I used apache bench to see how many requests per second I can get on a static page (simple hello world rails view), but I am only getting 4 requests/s.

ab -n 100 http://107.170.100.242/fo
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking 107.170.100.242 (be patient).....done


Server Software:        nginx/1.8.0
Server Hostname:        107.170.100.242
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /fo
Document Length:        5506 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   22.662 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      632600 bytes
HTML transferred:       550600 bytes
Requests per second:    4.41 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       226.617 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       226.617 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          27.26 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.0      0       0
Processing:   181  226  65.4    204     445
Waiting:      181  226  65.4    204     445
Total:        181  227  65.4    204     446

It should be literally thousands per second as I am using Nginx. I have been researching this for the entire day without results, can someone please direct me to the right path to solve this?

Answer 1

This would be the nginx config directive that will cause it to bypass the app server and serve the static files directly:

root /var/www/my_app/public; 

Are you sure that is right?