We are using Nginx on this web server. Look at the # of reading & writing
requests. a curl http://localhost/test.html can take up to 45 seconds.
Can anyone help?

Using telnet I can see that basically the Nginx server is taking time to get
to the TCP connection that I initiated.

This happens only during peak times of the web site.

Active connections: 8467
server accepts handled requests
380771 380771 835836
Reading: 75 Writing: 1497 Waiting: 6895
http://67.159.60.59/status 45.03 seconds

I've attached the nginx.conf

user www-data www-data;
worker_processes 32;

error_log /var/www/log/nginx_error.log;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
worker_connections 10024;
}

http {
include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;

sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
tcp_nodelay on;

server {
listen 80;
server_name xs.to;
root /var/www/xs;
error_page 404 index.php;
error_page 500 502 503 504 index.php;
access_log off;

location / {
root /var/www/xs;
index index.php default.php;
rewrite ^/albums/(.*)$ /albums/showalbum.php?$1? last;
rewrite ^/community/(.*)$ /community.php?$1? last;
error_page 404 index.php;
error_page 500 502 503 504 index.php;
}

location /status {
stub_status on;
access_log off;
}

location ~ .php$ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8888;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
error_page 404 index.php;
error_page 500 502 503 504 index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/xs/$fastcgi_script_name;
include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
}

location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|tiff|png|bmp|ico|fav|html)$ {
access_log off;
expires 30d;
}
}