Hi Maxim,

Thanks for looking into this - I may apply the fix you propose sometime in the future.

The solution I ended up with was kind of weird. I simply put the ssl_certificate related directives inside a "faux" server directive, that's also the first server directive containing ssl directives. As nginx picks the first one it finds, the correct certificate is still being inherited by other server directives. This caused the startup time to be drastically reduced.