I have a requirement to run a Java based web server on port 80. The options are:

• Web proxy (apache, nginx etc.)
• xinet
• iptables
• setuid

The baseline would be running the app using setuid but I'd prefer not to for security reasons. Apache is too slow and nginx doesn't support keep-alives so new connections are made for every proxied request.

xinet is easy to set up but creates a new process for every request which I've seen cause problems in a high performance environment.

The last option is port forwarding with iptables but I have no experience of how fast it is.

Of course, the ideal solution would be to do this on a dedicated hardware firewall / load balancer but that's not an option at present.