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Replacing N ports with one simplifies configuration.

I never understood the complex HAProxy in front of Apache in front of Nginx in front of Mongrel type setups that seem to be popular in the Rails world. Why not just use Unicorn? What value is GitHub getting from having Nginx in front?

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Unicorn is not for slow clients or static assets. That's what nginx is for. See http://unicorn.bogomips.org/PHILOSOPHY.html for info on Unicorn and slow clients.

nginx also has features like ESI, serving from memcached, and rate limiting which Unicorn does not (and doesn't need).

Because Ruby 1.8 threading sucks you pay a large memory price (ie a process) for each concurrent request in flight. A fronting proxy allows your backends to write out the response as fast as possible and move on to another request while the proxy spoon feeds the response to slow clients.

Also, nginx is going to be more efficient for serving static files, though most larger apps will have broken such requests out to a separate set of domains likely serviced by a cdn.

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