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Nginx is incredible. It's my second favorite piece of software (haproxy wins by a hair). At justin.tv we serve tens of billions of requests per month using nginx, and it uses so few system resources that we can run our CPU-heavy caching engine on the same servers.

Take a look at the source sometime. It's kind of fun to see an HTTP parser written like, "if (ngx_str3_cmp(m, 'G', 'E', 'T', ' ')) { r->method = NGX_HTTP_GET;"

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I've absolutely loved patching and working on modules for nginx source code. Partially I suspect because it's so homogeneous. It's nice and modular and succinct - the optimizations don't obfuscate the code. As others have pointed out, responding to http requests is not rocket science, and digging into nginx reminds you that responding to a simple problem simply tends to yield pretty good reliability and performance.

Good to hear you would recommend Nginx. Would you mind expanding on how you use Nginx and haproxy together ? Do you front haproxy with Nginx or vice-versa ?

nginx front end -> haproxy -> caching engine -> haproxy -> app instances (multiply this stack N times)

haproxy's HTTP feature set is comparatively limited and we simply have too much traffic to put one machine in front of a bunch of web servers.

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