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Step one if you haven’t already would be adding caching. Something like varnish in front for, if nothing else guest traffic, and memcached or redis for commonly fetched data.

For a lot of cases varnish (or a different reverse-proxy cache) will shave off 50% of your traffic from ever hitting the servers. It depends on your percentage of guests/sessioned users and and read/writes though.

After that using a cache like redis or memcached for things like user sessions/permissions and commonly fetched data significantly reduce the load on your database.

Unless you are expecting >1k req/sec with similar amount of writes, default nginx/postgres/mysql settings should be fine.

Focus on your app instead :)

For Postgres https://pgtune.leopard.in.ua/#/

Don't. Just use your cloud's hosted database instead.

I don't really understand why people _want_ to deal with all the nitty gritty stuff when it's so cheap and easy to have everything work perfectly and be maintained out of the box.