I’m quickly finding that openresty is an excellent stack, bundling a large number of nginx modules and Lua functionality. One of the most useful features I’ve found so far is the nginx Lua API’s ability to perform PCRE matches (Lua offers string.find, using a search syntax that is similar to PCRE, but lacks robustness). Performance with PCRE can be increased by using PCRE JIT (just-in-time) compilation; this is required to be present within the underlying system’s PCRE package. JIT was introduce in PCRE 8.21, and, go figure, the upstream package on CentOS is PCRE 7.8.