nginx produces four times more traffic than node-http-proxy

Question

we are using node-http-proxy for a while and it works fine. But as our system grows bigger, we want to move to nginx.

We consume about 100 request per second at the moment, which produce an outgoing traffic of about 1mb/s.

Our tests with nginx (same amount of requests, same backend servers and same responses) produce an outgoing traffic of about 4mb/s. We checked the headers, because that could have been the only difference in the response, but the headers didn't change that much.

Does anyone have an idea what else could produce this traffic increase?

Thanks, Kim

EDIT: We don't use clustering, they are just dumb reverse proxies. Requests from domain A go to server A, domain B to server B, ... We did tests in our production environment, so the backend servers stayed the same during tests, just the proxies changed.

Answer 1

We found out what happens: The old node.js server doesn't send all the required ssl certificates. The nginx sends all certificates (intermediate, etc.) with every request.