Linux – tune up performance nginx php-fpm thesql

I am running a nginx+php-fpm+mysql on virtual server with 8 cores and 16G ram
My aplication is a simple API provider server, which returns JSONs generated from mysql database on requests. Datasets are smost simple and only few kb big. But with a high load of 1000k users per sec. the simple requests takes 10 sekonds!!!.. which is very long. I assume its MYSQL that causes that slowly responses. Because I have a test database – same request to the test database takes 1sek. May be I need to tune up my mysql config to make requests faster? I am using mysqli and bind technique to generate output with php,

here are my configs:

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
# For more information on configuration, see:
#   * Official English Documentation: http://nginx.org/en/docs/
#   * Official Russian Documentation: http://nginx.org/ru/docs/

user              nginx;
worker_processes  8;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
#error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log  notice;
#error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log  info;

pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;


events {
  worker_connections 15000;
  multi_accept on;
  use epoll;
}


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

    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log  main;

    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;

    #keepalive_timeout  0;
    keepalive_timeout  100;

    #gzip  on;

    # Load config files from the /etc/nginx/conf.d directory
    # The default server is in conf.d/default.conf
    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;

}

/etc/my.cnf

[mysqld]
datadir=/var/lib/mysql
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

# Disabling symbolic-links is recommended to prevent assorted security risks
symbolic-links=0

# Settings user and group are ignored when systemd is used (fedora >= 15).
# If you need to run mysqld under a different user or group,
# customize your systemd unit file for mysqld according to the
# instructions in http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Systemd
user=mysql
# Semisynchronous Replication
# http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/replication-semisync.html
# uncomment next line on MASTER
;plugin-load=rpl_semi_sync_master=semisync_master.so
# uncomment next line on SLAVE
;plugin-load=rpl_semi_sync_slave=semisync_slave.so

# Others options for Semisynchronous Replication
;rpl_semi_sync_master_enabled=1
;rpl_semi_sync_master_timeout=10
;rpl_semi_sync_slave_enabled=1

# http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/performance-schema.html
;performance_schema


[mysqld_safe]
log-error=/var/log/mysqld.log
pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid