Here’s an interesting set of experiments trying to answer the question of how far can you go with HAProxy setup on the smallest of the Amazon EC2 instances – t2.micro (1 virtual CPU, 1 GB of RAM). Here’s the summary.
At 460 req/second response times are mostly a flat ~300 ms, except for two spikes. I attribute this to TCP congestion avoidance as the traffic approaches the limit and packets start to get dropped. After dropped packets are detected the clients reduce their transmission rate, but eventually the transmission rate stabilizes again just under the limit. Only 1739 requests timeout and 134918 succeed.
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It seems that the limit of the t2.micro is around 500 req/second even for small responses.
We were using HAProxy under a t2.micro configured for a bigger number along SSL offloading also, we have observed it working fine for around 3000 req/sec .