Our web nodes use 6mb of memory for all the web serving each. This frees up gigabytes compared to apache which we can use for more processes ( web and app notes are combined in shopify's case ). The speedup lies there. Added benefit is that nginx somehow manages to terminate SSL with a lot lower CPU load which makes the web/app configuration very appealing. We experimented with terminating SSL in the Ciscos but it seems to be impossible for Cisco that ships a firmware that has this and weighted load balancing working both.
Tremendous, in this case, is because the extremely low resource usage of nginx allowed us to remove an entire layer in our serverfarm flowchart and now we can use our machines much more efficient.
Tremendous, in this case, is because the extremely low resource usage of nginx allowed us to remove an entire layer in our serverfarm flowchart and now we can use our machines much more efficient.