Your comment makes nginx sound like some fly-by-night server that only achieved its performance by making lots of tiny-yet-dangerous "optimisations" like this o

Your comment makes nginx sound like some fly-by-night server that only achieved its performance by making lots of tiny-yet-dangerous "optimisations" like this one. More likely it is an omission, which could be rectified with a warning or failure running nginx -t (verify configuration). The actual performance comes from an architectural choice between event vs process based servers, as detailed in the C10k problem article. [1] [1] http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html