1000 requests per second?

[owkaye]

Greetings,

Can nginx -- running on one server -- deliver 1000 requests 
per second without "bogging down" and pushing more and more 
requests into a queue?  

Here's my reason for asking:

I'm designing a live auction website that needs to respond 
to 500-1000 requests per second for about an hour.  Each 
request will post only 20 bytes of data so the volume being 
posted is low.  Nevertheless the HTTP headers still need to 
be parsed and they will have far more volume than the 
actual post data -- so it seems I should do everything I 
can to reduce the HTTP header overhead.  This will 
substantially reduce the load and speed up nginx's response 
times, correct?

I'm wondering if nginx has the ability to use "Web Sockets" 
technology to eliminate all but the first HTTP header, and 
maintain a connection with the browser so data can be 
passed back and forth faster?

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#network

If this is not possible, can you tell me the best way to 
reduce the HTTP header overhead so I can make sure that 
each of those 1000 requests per second are responded to as 
fast as they come in?  Or am I concerned about something 
that's a non-issue, perhaps because nginx is so blazing 
fast that it can handle this kind of load without breaking 
a sweat?

The worst problem I can imagine is that during one of these 
live auctions the server will begin to respond slowly and 
push requests into a queue.  If this happens, bidders will 
not receive timely updates from the server and then the 
whole service loses credibility.

If Web Sockets is not an option, perhaps using Javascript in 
the visitor's browsers to send requests via XMLHttpRequest 
is the next-best option for reducing overhead?

http://axod.blogspot.com/

Thanks for any insights you can provide to help me decide 
whether or not nginx might be appropriate for my needs. 

Best,
Owkaye