Perceived poor performance

[Daniel L. Miller]

I don't know if this actually IS poor performance - it just feels like it.

I'm running nginx and php-fpm on a VirtualBox virtual server.  No other 
services are running (other than the standard Ubuntu Precise minor items 
for a server).  The VM has four cores and 1G allocated.

Any time I connect to my server it seems to take 3 seconds before the 
request is processed.  I've seen some references via Google that 
indicate this is TCP related - but I don't know where to look to find 
the break.

The second item - which is probably meaningless until the 3 second delay 
is resolved - is stress tests from an external server (I'm trying 
http://loader.io) start dropping connections after about 30 simultaneous 
connections.  From what little I've gathered about nginx performance 
this is absurd.
-- 
Daniel