Nginx TCP load balancer performs worse than single web server

I have a simple nginx tcp load balancer that simply passes connections to the web servers. The requests per second is lower using the load balancer with 2 servers than one of those servers by itself. The load balancer also doesn’t increase its requests per second when adding additional web servers… This doesn’t seem right. Any ideas what could be causing this?

# loads stream module
load_module /usr/lib/nginx/modules/ngx_stream_module.so;

# sets user to default user for web server
user www-data;

# sets number of cpu cores to use
worker_processes auto;

# customizes how to handle connections
events {

    # sets number of connections to use per cpu core
    worker_connections 1024;
    
    # uses efficient connection processing method
    use epoll;
    
    # sets worker processes to accept all connections
    multi_accept on;

}

# customizes how to handle incoming tcp connections
stream {

    # distributes secure connections between specified web servers
    upstream web_servers_insecure {
        
        # sets ip address and port of web servers
        server 147.182.205.7:80;
        #server 128.199.3.255:80;
        
    }

    # customizes how to handle insecure connections
    server {
        
        # sets port
        listen 80;
        
        # sends tcp connections to upstream directive
        proxy_pass web_servers_insecure;

    }

    # distributes secure connections between specified web servers
    upstream web_servers_secure {

        # sets ip address and port of web servers
        server 147.182.205.7:443;
        #server 128.199.3.255:443;

    }

    # customizes how to handle secure connections
    server {
        
        # sets port
        listen 443;
        
        # sends connections to upstream directive
        proxy_pass web_servers_secure;

    }

}