nginx, good for low-latency service on LAN?

[Mark Harrison]

nginx noob here... can I ask for a

I'm putting together a network metadata server to service
a large render farm.  My basic specs:

- the requests are simple: basically mapping a path-like
   string to a string of metadata:

       version_id("/foo/bar/baz") --> "17"

- processing is fast: the cache will consist of
   in-memory dictionaries, and the processing is
   nothing more than looking up keys in the dictionary
   and returning the associated values.

- load is very high: this will be hit by lots of
   machines doing image rendering.

- I would like to code this in python if feasible.

- I will have a couple of boxes behind a load balancer
   for scalability.

Does this sound like a reasonable task for nginx?
What's the typical latency I might expect to see
in a LAN environment, running on linux servers?

Any docs that are especially good to read?

Many thanks!
Mark

-- 
Mark Harrison
Pixar Animation Studios