This chapter was aimed at tweaking an NGINX configuration for HTTP clients. It started with a discussion about NGINX client buffers and related directives. These directives enable limiting I/O while reading requests. The section after that was aimed at the timeouts available in NGINX. It gave insights into the benefits of the keepalive HTTP mode. The sections about compression showed the NGINX configuration to reduce data sent over the network by using gzip in various ways. The chapter also talked about ways to configure NGINX logs and request access logs to control the information logged.

The last section summed up all the required changes and tried to test them. The changes do not yield any gain on a fast network. These configuration changes are aimed at solving issues that manifest on a slow network, and, thus, to test these changes, a proper environment is required.

The directives configured can be readily used by a browser, but the benchmark tooling needs to be configured properly to make use of these settings. The chapter showed ways to enable/disable the required settings in Siege and JMeter. In the end, performance tests were performed to determine the effectiveness of the changes.

In the next chapter, we will try to tune the TCP stack for optimal performance.