The new auth_delay directive for delaying unauthorized requests. The request processing is delayed by a timer. Since nginx updates internal time once at the start of each event loop iteration, this normally ensures constant time delay, adding a mitigation from time-based attacks. A notable exception to this is the case when there are no additional events before the timer expires. To ensure constant-time processing in this case as well, we trigger an additional event loop iteration by posting a dummy event for the next event loop iteration.