How it works...

Let's take apart the details line-by-line:

• The Active connections line lists the amount of connections to the server. For a quiet server, this could be less than a dozen. For a busy server, expect this to be in the hundreds.
• The server accepts handled requests line is little confusing, since it's represented by three numbers (81, 81, and 177 in this example). The first number represents the amount of accepted connections. The second number represents the total number of handled connections. Unless there's a resource limitation, the number of accepted and handled connections should be the same. Next, we have the total number of client requests.
• The last line represents the state of the active connections. Reading means NGINX is reading the request headers, Writing means NGINX is writing data back to the client, and Waiting means that the client is now idle but still has the connection open (due to keep-alives).