NGINX Performance Tuning

Nginx is remarkably capable of serving a huge number of requests with a very efficient latency. With the proper combination of hardware and software, Nginx can concurrently handle a massive number of requests per second.

First, you need to install the latest version of Nginx. Follow the official guild to install Nginx. https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/tutorials/install/

Before moving forward, keep a backup of the original configuration file cp /etc/nginx/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.orig

I've written inline comments on each configuration parameters that you may need to optimize. Please go through each of them and update as per your requirements.

Now start editing :
vim /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

# Basically, this number should match the number of cores on your system.
# But, the latest version calculates it automatically.
# Run 'nproc' to find out the number of cpu cores.
worker_processes 12; # Assuming that you have 12 cores
# Number of file descriptors used for Nginx.
# This can be set in the OS with 'ulimit -n 20000'
# or using /etc/security/limits.conf.
# If you don't set it then OS settings will be used which is by default 2000.
worker_rlimit_nofile 1000;

# Only log critical errors.
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log crit;

# Provides the configuration file context in which the directives
# that affect connection processing are specified.
events {
    # Determines how many clients will be served by each worker process.
    # (Max clients = worker_connections * worker_processes)
    # "Max clients" is also limited by the number of socket connections
    # available on the system (~64k)
    worker_connections 4000;

    # Optimized to serve many clients with each thread, essential for Linux
    use epoll;

    # Accept as many connections as possible after Nginx gets the notification
    # about a new connection.
    # May flood worker_connections, if that option is set too low.
    multi_accept on;
}
http {

    # To speed up IO disable access log
    access_log off;

    # Cache informations about FDs, frequently accessed files.
    # Changing this can boost performance.
    # Test and find out the best setting for you
    open_file_cache max=20000 inactive=20s;
    open_file_cache_valid 30s;
    open_file_cache_min_uses 2;
    open_file_cache_errors on;

    # Sendfile copies data between one FD and other from within the kernel.
    # More efficient than read() + write(), since this requires transferring
    # data to and from the user space.
    sendfile on;

    # tcp_nopush causes Nginx to attempt to send
    # its HTTP response head in one packet,
    # Instead of using partial frames.
    # This is useful for prepending headers before calling sendfile,
    # or for throughput optimization.
    tcp_nopush on;

    # Don't buffer data sent, good for small data bursts in real time.
    tcp_nodelay on;

    # Server will close the connection after this time.
    keepalive_timeout 30;

    # Number of requests a client can make over the keep-alive connection.
    keepalive_requests 100000;

    # Allow the server to close connection on non responding client,
    # this will free up memory
    reset_timedout_connection on;

    # Send the client a "request timed out"
    # if the body is not loaded by this time.
    # Default is 60.
    client_body_timeout 10;

    # If client stop responding, free up memory. Default is 60.
    send_timeout 2;

    # Compression. Reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred
    # over the network.
    gzip on;
    gzip_min_length 10240;
    gzip_proxied expired no-cache no-store private auth;
    gzip_types text/plain text/css text/xml text/javascript application/x-javascript application/xml;
    gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.";
    include conf.d/*.conf;
    include sites-enabled/*.conf;
}

To verify the configurations is syntactically correct, run sudo nginx -t. If okay, run sudo nginx -s reload to reload the configurations.