Ah, gotcha. If, under load, you can gracefully return an error and your user will just come back later (like the twitter fail whale), then you might as well ke

Ah, gotcha. If, under load, you can gracefully return an error and your user will just come back later (like the twitter fail whale), then you might as well keep your queue lengths short which close the window where a waiting user will hit refresh. If you have some requirement that prevents the above, and have large queue lengths, then this may be very useful for you. As well, some server configurations might not like getting the first part of the HTTP response much before the rest of it. Nginx will just buffer it all before returning the entire response to the client so it doesn't affect packetization of the response sent back to the end-user.