+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.

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.

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.

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.

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.