Cloudflare has made significant improvements to its network's performance by optimizing NGINX, a popular web server software. The company estimates that these changes save the internet approximately 54 years of wait time per day. By modifying NGINX to handle slow disk I/O operations in separate threads and using non-blocking open() calls, Cloudflare has achieved peak p99 TTFB improvements by a factor of six. These optimizations have resulted in faster load times for the 10 million websites, apps, and APIs that use Cloudflare's services.