I am a moron. This is embarassing, you'd think that 'siege reported the same results...doesn't use keepalive' would have lit a bulb somewhere. Setting a valid Content-Length gives a much nicer picture, and it still only uses half the cpu: Server Software: nginx Server Hostname: amaterasu Server Port: 443 SSL/TLS Protocol: TLSv1/SSLv3,RC4-SHA,2048,128by Xeriar - Nginx Mailing List - English
So, I'm having an issue with SSL and fastcgi_pass, specifically to PHP. PHP over standard http gets me over 6,000 requests per second, without stressing the CPU. It's limited by somaxconn and maximum php children. Static SSL also easily passes 6,000 requests per second without stressing the CPU. It's limited by raw bandwidth. Setting up a proxy on localhost and forcing it through proxby Xeriar - Nginx Mailing List - English