NGINX on OSX - Performing terribly slow
Solution 1:
Start by stripping out all unnecessary configuration options.
Get the setup to a bare-bones 'Im only serving HTML files' default configuration. Remove optimizations.
Slowly start adding aspects back in a few at a time, restart your stack and test.
If you're feeling ambitious, you can run strace on a single server process to get timings. Have a look at this for a crash course.