I'm setting up a HA (high availability) cluster using nginx, haproxy & apache.

I've been reading great things about nginx and haproxy. People tend to choose one or the other but I like both. Haproxy is more flexible for load balancing than nginx's simple round robin (even with the upstream-fair patch). But I'd like to keep nginx for redirecting non-https to https among other things right at the point of entry to the cluster.

On the other hand, nginx is a lot faster for serving static contents and would reduce the load on the powerful apache which loves to eat a lot of RAM!

Here is my planned setup:

Load balancer: nginx listens on port 80/443 and proxy_forwards to haproxy on 8080 on the same server to load balance between the multiple nodes.

Nodes: nginx on the node listens to requests coming from haproxy on 8080, if the content is static, serve it. But if it's a backend script (in my case PHP), proxy forward to apache2 on the same node server listenning on a different port number.

Technically this setup works but my concerns are whether having the requests going through several proxies is going to slow down requests? Most of the requests will be PHP requests as the backends are services (which means groing from nginx -> haproxy -> nginx -> apache).

Thoughts? Cheers