Monitor requests per second with Nginx

Hello.

After several hours of testing, I decided to register here to ask for some support. I have some trouble monitoring requests per second with nginx. It is working fine on small amounts of traffic, but gets killed on larger amounts.

I have been using the linux tools "ab" and "wrk" to test with, and monitored nginx with the default stub status page.

Testing with "ab" results in nginx getting killed at 20000 requests per second.

Testing with "wrk", sending empty requests, nginx handles up to 160000 requests per second.

I also tried to use a load balancer up front of two of my servers to see if it handled more traffic, but it capped at 35000 requests per second.

Is this the best way to do it, and how can I configure nginx to handle a higher amount of requests per second?

Thanks in advance.