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WebSockets are persistent connections, not a state-management trick spanning multiple connections/requests. The only time nginx is involved in "routing" the socket is on the initial connection. Once established, nginx is simply relaying data over an active, persistent TCP/unix sockets.

For the initial connection, you can use any of nginx's normal proxy load balancing options (ip_hash, least_conn, etc).

HAProxy can, reportedly, load balance WebSocket connections:

http://blog.exceliance.fr/2012/11/07/websockets-load-balanci...

dotCloud's Hipache also looks like it was basically written to solve this problem:

https://github.com/dotcloud/hipache

I'd expect the ip_hash directive to work as usual http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpUpstreamModule#ip_hash although it's not exactly sticky sessions. There's a separate module for that https://github.com/michaelneale/nginx-sticky-module