user122875's questions

I am running an nginx server behind a separate (L-4) load balancer that basically just serves static files and forwards requests to a downstream web server. This works great as long as all the services are running.

The problem is that if the downstream web server goes down, I want nginx to stop accepting all requests(so that the load balancer will notice it is down). Is it possible to do this? According to the nginx documentation, if there is only one server in the upstream group(say localhost), the max_failures setting is ignored, meaning nginx will continue to forward requests to the dead app server. Can I basically tell nginx to just stop everything after a certain number of failures?

EDIT Using L4 load balancing

I am setting up an app to be hosted using VMs(probably amazon, but that is not set in stone) which will require both HTTP load balancing and load balancing a large number(50k or so if possible) of persistant TCP connections. The amount of data is not all that high, but updates are frequent.

Right now I am evaluating load balancers and am a bit confused about the architecture of HAProxy. If I use HAProxy to balance the TCP connections, will all the resulting traffic have to flow through the load balancer? If so, would another solution(such as LVS or even nginx_tcp_proxy_module) be a better fit?