These tricks are cute, but at the time nginx's performance came from much more fundamental design decisions. First, the async model was literally years ahead o

These tricks are cute, but at the time nginx's performance came from much more fundamental design decisions. First, the async model was literally years ahead of Apache. It leaned heavily on interfaces like epoll to manage large connection pools with a small number of processes, while Apache still used a thread or process per connection. Second, it removed exactly the right features - those with minimal benefit and high performance impact. The classic example is .htaccess, which adds (at least) one stat to every single request, but in practice was only needed for the horrible multi-tenant LAMP reseller setups of the day - everyone else was fine with static centralized configuration.