So your total criteria for what constitutes a "better reverse proxy" isn't performance, isn't lowest latency, isn't full HTTP compliance, isn't dynamic reconfiguration, or pluggable load balancing mechanisms but rather configuration files??
Sorry if I don't hold your opinion to that high a standard in that case.
Configuration files are important. You understand that once you have to untangle thousands upon thousands of lines of apache configuration. Luckily for me, that can pay a decent rate :D
In the context of load balancing, on the performance + latency + load balancing mechanism + configuration files criteria, Apache is the worst by a huge margin compared to both HAProxy and nginx.
Maybe 5-7 years ago then yeah... maybe. Not even close today. Apache has lowest latency and faster total transaction time based on various benchmarks. It all depends on how you are using it.
"configuration files criteria"
Got me there. But then again, 2.4 adds a LOT of ways to even streamline that, like mod_macro, mod_define, etc...
Performance + latency => I dunno what world you live in. Apache is still stuck in the prefork era (not that it's mandatory but it is how it works most of the time). It's not even playing in the same order of magnitude.
Load balancing => Apache doesn't even support healthchecks. I won't even get into the lack of TCP/TLS support or the lack of some load balancing algorithms.
I don't know what world you live in, but Apache only runs prefork if you configure it to run in prefork. Saying that is "how it works most of the time" is complete and total nonsense. I don't even know how to parse that...
Also complete and total nonsense is the lack of health checks (which is, iirc, only available for paid nginx), TLS support and load balancing algos. I think nginx has some kind of hash LB method that httpd doesn't, although httpd has round-robin, byrequests, bytraffic, and bybusyness.
There are numerous modules and setup stuck in prefork mode. And the alternative with workers is a joke compared to the event loop of HAProxy and nginx.
HAProxy > nginx > apache
Of course if you compare apache to nginx, you can find stuff where nginx is lacking too.
Agreed, a lot of critical features are stripped in the open source nginx.
Sorry if I don't hold your opinion to that high a standard in that case.