Comment Re:What we need (Score 1) 209
Sorry, that was dumb and rude on my part - I glossed over everything but multiplexing.
Your right, Nginx doesn't have a FastCGI process manager built in. PHP has a couple, I use PHP-FPM which is part of PHP as of 5.3.3. There's also spawn-fcgi ( http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/spawn-fcgi/wiki ) for more generic needs. This completely seperates the HTTP server from the application (even to another machine if you like), but is certainly another thing to configure.
As for actual connection persistence to backends, I know that has been discussed, but thought the performance difference was negligible and added serious complexity to have Nginx maintain a connection pool to backends.