[ominous_prime]

As a simple reverse proxy for small setups, there is almost no difference between the two, especially when running on a VM. You do miss many of the advanced balancing features in haproxy, but again, this config was a basic reverse proxy, not really load-balancing anything.

I haven't worked on these in a couple years, but on real hardware, haproxy could push much more bandwidth. We could saturate 10Gb ethernet fairly easily at the time, which wasn't possible at all with nginx.

[TallGuyShort]

+1 to your second paragraph. I've previously carried out what I considered a pretty fair benchmark: real hardware, realistic server setup, well-informed configuration of both nginx and haproxy, etc... HAProxy had significantly bettter performance in my results. Not questioning their results, just surprised.

[V1]

I'll be more then happy to see if my configurations can be tweaked. And I was surprised as well, but it seems that it always boils down to the configuration files a small change can sometimes yield great results as seen with a specifying ciphers for SSL.

[ominous_prime]

Like I said, running as a simple reverse-proxy, they should be pretty close. The added latency is really the differentiator when going to a single backend, and that's about all you're measuring. You're control itself is still <400rps.

Now add dozens of backend servers, and start throwing a couple orders of magnitude more traffic at it, and the differences will really start to show.

Please note: I'm not saying your numbers aren't useful. Many people will be using a setup like this, and would like to know what the differences would be, if any.

[V1]

Thanks for you feedback, I did do some testing with multiple backends (4 different servers) but it didn't show any substantial changes. I'll see if I can do some in depth in a while.

[GibbyBorn]

netflix has chosen nginx to saturate much more than 10Gb. Do you ever try to tune it? In fact nginx default config just sucks, it seems for small vps.