Research and source map

Selected primary references guide the implementation and explanations. Older engineering articles explain design intent; the matching vendor source and current directive reference decide version-specific behavior.

Reference	Use in the inspector
NGINX developer guide	Hook registration, requests, pools, filters and event model
Inside NGINX: performance and scale	Master/worker architecture and graceful reload
How nginx processes a request	Server and location interpretation
HTTP core	Body, output, access and timeout policy
Proxy module	Buffering, retries and cache behavior
Upstream module	Peer selection, reuse and timing variables
Caching guide	Cache outcomes and lock/revalidation concepts
Request limiting	Direct rate-limit outcome variable
Connection limiting	Outcome and multiplexed-request accounting
Auth subrequests	Child request interpretation
Thread pools	File-I/O offload versus policy-only observations
HTTP/2	Protocol-specific limits and coverage boundaries
HTTP/3	QUIC coverage boundary
Debug logging	Optional deeper investigation outside this collector
Official source	Verify concrete structure and state-machine behavior

Coverage standard for new insights

Each new claim needs a producer observation, a bounded schema field, validation, a real nginx fixture, a UI explanation and a documented limit. A plausible story based only on elapsed time or an HTTP status is insufficient.

Read The nginx engine to connect these references to captured evidence. See coverage for explicit unobserved areas.