Hehe read till the end with the comments, especially the collapsed graphs!
There were big mistakes in this test, failing on a large number of settings, and even the NGINX tests were not as good as they ought to be in some aspects. This conducting Amir, Libby and I to join efforts on documenting better methodology for benchmarks, that we published under the Data Plane Benchmark project at https://github.com/dpbench/dpbench/ and later to the new test in this article: https://www.haproxy.com/blog/haproxy-forwards-over-2-million...
This was great and productive cooperation between engineers, despite working on different (and sometimes competing) projects, resulting in more reliable methods for everyone in the end.
Hey, Willy, I just wanted to take a moment of my day to thank you for haproxy. It is among my most favorite tools in my tool belt!
"NGINX suffers virtually no latency at any percentile. The highest latency that any significant number of users might experience (at the 99.9999th percentile) is roughly 8ms.
What do these results tell us about user experience? As mentioned in the introduction, the metric that really matters is response time from the end‑user perspective, and not the service time of the system under test."
[1] https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-and-haproxy-testing-user-ex...