How to rate-limit concurrent sessions with nginx or haproxy?

I'm currently using nginx to reverse-proxy requests from web clients that are doing long-polling to an upstream.

Since we're doing long polling (as opposed to websockets), when a client connects it will make multiple http connections to the server in serial, re-establishing a connection every time the server sends it some data (or timing out and re-establishing if the server has nothing to say for 10 seconds).

What I'd like to do is limit the number of concurrent web clients. Since the clients are constantly making new HTTP requests instead of keeping a single request open, it's a little tricky to count the total number of web clients (because it's not the same as total number of concurrently connected http clients).

The method I've come up with is to track http requests by the originating IP address, and store the IP address somewhere with a TTL of 20 seconds. If a request comes in whose IP isn't recognized, then we check the total number of unexpired stored IP addresses; if that's less than the maximum then we allow this request through. And if a request comes in with an IP address that we can find in the look-up table that hasn't yet expired, then it is allowed through as well. All requests that are allowed through have their IPs added to the table (if not there before) and the TTL refreshed to 20 seconds again.

I had actually whipped something together that worked correctly this way using nginx along with the Redis 2.0 Nginx Module (and the nginx lua module to simplify the conditional branching), using redis to store my IP addresses with a TTL (the SETEX command), and checking the table size with the DBSIZE command.

This worked but the performance was horrible. nginx and redis ended up using lots of cpu and the machine could only handle a very small number of concurrent requests.

The new stick-table and tracking counters that were added to Haproxy in version 1.5 (via a commission from serverfault) seem like they might be ideal to implement exactly this sort of rate limiting, because the stick-table can track IP addresses and automatically expire entries. However, I don't see an easy way to get a total count of the unexpired entries in the stick table, which would be necessary to know the number of connected web clients.

I'm curious if anyone has any suggestions, for nginx or haproxy or even for something else not mentioned here that I haven't thought of yet.