Has anyone used nginx with cherrypy?
It's brilliant. Almost effort-free and insanely fast, in most cases.
It offers a really cool path too, in nginx + Py -> nginx + Py/C -> nginx + C plugin, to grow from a quick throw-together prototype to something that will take as much load as you can make up with silly benchmarking tools, while development takes a sensible route.
Edit: As a cool more concrete example, I used this trick to build a very quick 'hardware access layer' for an embedded device when it was insisted that Flash be used for the UI. It was 99% Python but with nginx to serve static files and proxy the rest to Flash, and CherryPy as an access layer to a local SQLite DB for data, with Python C calls to proprietary hardware drivers for the device.
Sounds sloppy perhaps but for what it had to do and how well it runs it was incredibly quick and painless to put together.
http://shoptalkapp.com is nginx -> haproxy -> (cherrypy/diesel)
So I can't do my fancy HAProxy routing rules on HTTP requests HAProxy can't read--it would be reduced to a simple TCP-level balancer then.
Basically, nginx is there for ssl, gzip, caching (redis/memcache mod), and all those http-plugin-goodness things. Simple proxy directly to HAProxy on loopback, which specializes in load balancing, traffic routing, failover, etc. Then, finally, the application code on N nodes behind HAProxy.
I.e., if Host header is X, and Ip is Y, but no cookie was provided, then use pool... with this balancing scheme.
nginx's proxy setup out of the box is useful, but I wouldn't consider it on par with things like ZXTM or a Big IP when it comes to robust balancing/fallback patterns and flexible routing rules.
If there's a module that provides all that, I'm happy to hear about it--I haven't found it yet.