Performance Introduction

Objectives

Welcome to the final lesson in our series. By the end of this article, you’ll understand key techniques to harden and speed up your Nginx-powered applications. We’ll cover:

Objectives

Feature	Benefit
Rate limiting	Protect against DDoS, brute-force logins, and web scraping
Caching (Nginx)	Reduce backend load and improve response times
Compression (Gzip)	Decrease payload sizes without extra software
Keep-Alive connections	Maintain persistent client–server connections
Log analysis & troubleshooting	Identify errors and performance issues via access and error logs
System monitoring (Datadog)	Gather continuous metrics and alerts with Datadog

Effective performance tuning requires balancing resource usage and user experience. Always test changes in a staging environment before deploying to production.

In the sections that follow, you’ll learn how to:

Configure rate limiting to throttle abusive traffic.
Set up Nginx caching directives for static and dynamic content.
Enable Gzip compression and fine-tune its parameters.
Optimize keep-alive settings for long-lived connections.
Parse Nginx logs to pinpoint and resolve errors.
Install and configure Datadog for real-time monitoring.

Grab your favorite beverage and let’s dive in!

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Summary

Rate Limiting

⌘I

Introduction

Install Config

Intermediate Config

Security

Performance

Conclusion

Performance Introduction

Objectives

Watch Video

Introduction

Install Config

Intermediate Config

Security

Performance

Conclusion

​Objectives

Watch Video

Objectives