This post will walk you through the performance tuning steps that I took to serve 1.2 million JSON "API" requests per second from a 4 vCPU AWS EC2 instance. For the purposes of this recreated quest, we will ignore most of the dead ends and dark alleyways that I had to struggle through on my solo expedition.
Instead, we will mainly stick to the happy path, moving steadily from serving 224k req/s at the start, with the default configuration, to a mind-blowing 1.2M req/s by the time we reach the end.