Once you have your NGINX configuration working, you can turn your focus to fine tuning to enhance performance. A few sections of this chapter will focus on delivering increased performance for users, while others will focus on delivering performance enhancements at a server level to allow greater concurrency.
As with any tuning, you need to ensure that you understand the limits first.
– Donald Knuth, 1974
In the context of NGINX, you need to ensure that you know what the limits are before changing them. Not all changes will necessarily result in performance increases if they don't suit your system or if they're not a current limitation.
On the flip side, optimization of your NGINX server is also critical to ensure that your website or application can handle increased traffic and to ensure fast responses. Especially when it comes to e-commerce platforms, keeping user engagement through low response times is paramount. Studies conducted by Amazon found that an increase in the page load time by one second would result in a loss of over $1.6 billion in revenue each year. Even without e-commerce, the last thing that you would want a user to be doing is waiting unnecessarily, as they will disengage very quickly.