I have a nfs which several frontend-servers are connected to for making the files stored on the nfs available for http downloads. It looks like I have problems with the way apache is serving the files, there seems to be a very small buffer or no buffer at all which results in a lot disk seeks. I did some testing with loading the whole requested file into memory at once and serve it to the client from memory. With this technique I need less disk seeks for a download stream.

Since I don't want to implement this by myself for production use I thought that I could maybe use nginx for that because the documentation says that it uses buffers for static file serving.

Is it possible to increase the buffer size to a few mb, if so which config parameter do I have to change for this? Has anyone experience with large buffers for static file serving? Is there a better way to reduce disk seeks?