Before adapting your infrastructure to increasingly high traffic, you should always look for solutions offered by your current set of tools. If traffic causes your server to become unresponsive because of blocking operations, such as slow disk reads, you should give thread pools a try. If this turns out to be insufficient, load balancing is the next-best thing. Thankfully, as we have discovered in this chapter, implementing a load-balanced architecture is made particularly easy by Nginx; you can even use it to distribute the load of other server applications, such as MySQL, email, and more.

Now that we have seen a basic yet comprehensive approach to the most advanced mechanisms offered by Nginx, we will continue by exploring four real life case studies.