NGINX Caching

[cls]

Hello

I'm looking for a web server to serve as a front end reverse proxy for a web application built on mod_perl  Currently I'm using apache and mod_proxy, but I'm not happy with mod_proxy's implementation because it doesn't provide me any high availability/failover for the backend nodes. 

I would like an server that can do the following things: 
1) serve static assets for my pages (js/css/images/etc..) 
2) proxy the page requests back to a mod_perl app layer for dynamic page generation
3) be "aware" of the health of the app layer nodes so as not to send requests to a node that is down
4) support SSL client connections
5) compress output to clients
6) support named virtual hosts
7) provide URL rewriting
8) runs on linux/centOS
9) and support caching of dynamically generated pages (provided they contain the correct cache headers) 


I'm not having much luch finding a sever that can peform all of these functions, but it looks like NGINX and lighthttpd are my closest bets.  NGINX seems like it will do everything except #9.  I can't find any information in the NGINX documentation that mentions the ability to support caching of pages to prevent full requests from going back to the app layer for every hit.  So... two questions

1) Am I missing something?  Does NGINX in fact support caching? 
2) Is NGINX a good fit for my project give my other requirements?

Thanks a lot for your responses.

Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,75533,75533#msg-75533