The most popular hosting Operating System (OS) for NGINX is Linux, which is why we have focused on it in this book. Like NGINX, the out-of-the-box parameters are a good balance between resource usage and performance.
One of the neat features of Linux is the fact that most of the kernel (the engine of the OS) can be tweaked and tuned as required. In fact, nearly every underlying aspect can be adjusted quite easily to ensure that you can perfectly tune it to your needs. With over 1,000 configurable parameters in the kernel, there's virtually infinite tuning available.
Like our warning at the beginning of this chapter however, larger numbers don't necessarily reflect greater performance. It's important to ensure that you understand what parameters you're changing to understand the impact they'll have.
