as i patched lighthttpd to work with the servlet and the next patches discontinued over a period, i was somehow motivated to check another services, for the same reason.
i just needed the webserver to redirect and reverse proxy the requests and responses from the different instances/services to the client. no php, just port handling and some folder/path specialties. so i kicked lighty and droped nginx on the system.
the configuration wasnt that re-usable as i hoped, but the plenty examples on the web made it possible to came up with the service after two weekends. nginx performed well in the official benchmark examples and i was happy with the result, ive seen on my own on the examples i made. handling the j-session-id was done with a patch and the round-robbin worked much more smooth, then before.
the delivered pages were quick and the hunger for ram was low, so i raised the caching on the webserver a bit higher and played with different configurations between tomcat and nginx over the next weekends. i was ok with what ive seen, so the need to dive into the apache config was not a topic anymore.