Comment by gritzko

More like a chat server or a sync server. Normal Web server connections are short lived. Flash crowds from HN would give 100K visits a day maybe, that is like 1 or 2 at a time unless you WebSocket them.

Imagine what sort of traffic you need to saturate 1000 conns with HTTP. Can your single thread app handle it? If you are not using nginx, that must be something less trivial than a reverse proxy. Nginx can do lots of things, by the way.