Why Use Nginx?
One thing I still don't understand is why one would use a proxy server at all?Why not just have your load balancers (which can operate cheaply at the TCP layer) throw traffic directly at your application servers?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?Is nginx primarily useful for slow application server runtimes that can't keep up with what nginx can do?