Tir looks nice too. It is more targeted at websocket type applications, although it is general purpose too. Nginx supports more traditional HTTP models, I dont know of any native websocket support for it, but you can of course use it to proxy to mongrel/node or whatever. Nginx has the maturity advantage, and you can use it as a proxy, load balancer, and so on. With the Lua support and these additional modules that taobao developed you get a full environment all in one place.