Understanding How NGINX and HAProxy Improve Response Times (DDoS Testing)

#ddos #security #nginx #networking

I'm building a DDoS mitigation tool, and understanding how these attacks work and bypass each mitigation technique is crucial. I ran performance tests on Gunicorn, along with NGINX and HAProxy in front of it.

The results show that adding NGINX or HAProxy significantly reduces response times compared to Gunicorn alone. This is interesting because I even disabled NGINX caching, so that wasn't the factor.

Question: Can anyone explain how NGINX and HAProxy achieve such a performance boost, especially under increasing attack load? In my tests, I gradually increased the number of IPs simulating the DDoS attack over time. Understanding this will be valuable for my DDoS mitigation tool.