Write out path for static sites
From https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/1881#note_33611871
In discussing this we ran out of time when I was trying to reconstruct what happens for such static sites. Understanding currently is
- request reaches NGINX --> Workhorse --> Unicorn --> unicorn realizes it is static and fetches the cached html blob from the web worker's local / physical cache, sends it back out.
Static assets have this flow: LB > Nginx > Workhorse > disk.
- if the page is served through GitLab Pages, not clear to me at the moment whether the request flows from workhorse to Pages, or from Unicorn to Pages, but in any case GitLab Pages is a service that runs on the web worker (needs to be added to the Web box on the production architecture diagram) \cc @ayufan you may know more about the correct placement.
Pages have this flow: LB > Pages daemon > disk. Pages is a microservice can be on separate server and it's only requirement is to have NFS share with all the pages. It doesn't need Unicorn.
I need to document this on handbook/engineering/performance.