Delay between nginx-s3-gateway accepting connections, and having files to serve?

[dstromberg]

Hi.

I'm an nginxinc/nginx-s3-gateway newbie.

I'm attempting to set up a test S3 gateway. Actually, it seems to work - after a bit of a delay. That wouldn't be much of a problem if it weren't for the gateway tending to start listening well before the files in the S3 server start appearing in the gateway. IOW, the gateway comes up, starts accepting connections, delays for some reason, and only then do the actual files it's intended to serve start to be visible.

That means either we need to address this problem, or add retries to a bunch of automated tests - which of course would slow down our test suite measurably.

We are using byte ranges. And our files tend to be megabytes in size. But would the known byte range issue cause files to seem to not be there? I'm guessing no, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Behind the gateway, we have S3 MinIO RELEASE.2025-04-08T15-41-24Z.

We're using the "latest" nginx-s3-gateway from dockerhub.

Any suggestions?

[dstromberg]

I'm told that this is not a matter of needing to wait "long enough". Another person on my team said he left it sitting for about 50 minutes, and nginx-s3-gateway still thought there were zero files to serve. But upon restarting the gateway, things started working.

[dstromberg]

We're exploring PROXY_CACHE_INACTIVE.... Got a good result with it once, but still could be a coincidence.

[dstromberg]

It looks like setting PROXY_CACHE_INACTIVE around the same time as a good download via the gateway was a coincidence. :(

Also, apparently this isn't just a matter of waiting long enough - one of my teammates gave it 50 minutes, and the gateway was still unusable. Restarting all our containers seems to fix (for some definitions of "fix") it though.

What does nginx-s3-gateway do if at its time of startup, the S3 service isn't up yet or is up but has no bucket created in it yet?