understanding nginx proxy magic

[Johan Martinez]

I installed nginx as a reverse proxy in front of apache server. No
configuration change was made on apache and nginx is simply passing all
requests to the backend apache. Now website is more responsive and it can
handle 1.3 times more load than just apache in picture. I am wondering
what's nginx magic that made website faster even though apache is still
doing almost all the work. I am not systems expert so any pointers on why
such setup is faster will be helpful. There isn't much configuration to
nginx than:

 location / {
            proxy_set_header Host www.example.com;
            proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1:8080;
            proxy_redirect off;
        }


Reason for such simple setup is to slowly migrate from apache to nginx.

- Johan
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