As a simple reverse proxy for small setups, there is almost no difference between the two, especially when running on a VM. You do miss many of the advanced balancing features in haproxy, but again, this config was a basic reverse proxy, not really load-balancing anything.
I haven't worked on these in a couple years, but on real hardware, haproxy could push much more bandwidth. We could saturate 10Gb ethernet fairly easily at the time, which wasn't possible at all with nginx.
I haven't worked on these in a couple years, but on real hardware, haproxy could push much more bandwidth. We could saturate 10Gb ethernet fairly easily at the time, which wasn't possible at all with nginx.