Load Balancer and Proxy setup in AWS exhibits patchy performance

Background

An HTTP request sent by an end-user to www.stuff.com/things is processed as follows:

1. Received by an application Load Balancer (the public load balancer) that load balances to an NGINX reverse proxy (Let's call this the security proxy).
2. The security proxy routes the request to a private application load balancer.
3. The private load balancer routes traffic based on the URL. if the url is /things/... then the request is routed to another NGINX proxy.
4. This second NGINX proxy (lets call this the things proxy) routes all requests to a classic load balancer.
5. The classic load balancer listens on ports 80 and 50000 and balances requests to instances hosting the things application.

So to recap: I have the public load balancer, the security proxy, the private load balancer, the things proxy, and the classic load balancer.

The problem

When a user tries to visit www.stuff.com/things, they wait, and they wait, and they eventually receive an HTTP 504: gateway timeout. Or, the page loads immediately. Or, some elements load quickly while other hang.

Debugging

I've tried issuing requests from several places in the chain:

1. curl the classic load balancer, response is instantaneous
2. curl the things proxy, response is instantaneous
3. curl the private load balancer, response is instantaneous
4. curl the security proxy, response is instantaneous
5. curl the public load balancer, response is slooooow... except when it's fast.

Perhaps I need to reconfigure my proxies?

Proxy Configuration

The things proxy is configured as follows:

events { worker_connections 1024; } http { server { location ^~ /proxycheck { return 200 'available'; add_header Content-Type text/plain; } location / { proxy_pass ${PROXY_ADDRESS}; } } } 

The security proxy is configured as follows:

events { worker_connections 1024; } http { server { location ^~ /proxycheck { return 200 'available'; add_header Content-Type text/plain; } location / { proxy_pass ${PROXY_ADDRESS}; proxy_read_timeout 90; proxy_redirect default; proxy_set_header Host $host:$server_port; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; } } } 

In the future, the security proxy will check certificates. Until then, I've got this other problem.

Any suggestions?