Why Use Nginx?
One thing I still don't understand is why one would use a proxy server at all?<p>Why not just have your load balancers (which can operate cheaply at the TCP layer) throw traffic directly at your application servers?<p>If you need caching, that's cheap to do, too. If you need static file serving, can't you another load balancer end-point that points directly at static content servers, or make your application servers faster?<p>Is nginx primarily useful for slow application server runtimes that can't keep up with what nginx can do?