And in the end, the only meaningful benchmark for you is the one performed on your deployment environment and with your application.
These generic tests (if the conditions in which they were performed are clear) can only be used to skim through all the available options to identify those who clearly under-perform (agreed, identify why could be even more useful than the test itself).
a while back when tornado (for python) came out, there was a whole slew of benchmarks comparing it to twisted. as a guy who uses twisted a lot, i was interested. all the benchmarks said tornado was faster by maybe a hundred or a couple hundred requests/sec and therefore was the superior framework.
the big question is, what difference does it make? not a single article i read mentioned the fact that twisted has a really awesome streaming API, has great TCP and UDP level support, has support for a ton of other protocols (and writing your own), or is insanely useful for non-web projects. i never read about a single feature tornado had either or why one is worth investing time in than another.
same thing for this "benchmark". i might as well write off varnish, since it serves fewer requests/sec than nginx, right? wrong! it's a different thing all together -- no mention of that anywhere in the article though. the author just says (in not so many words) it's a piece of crap compared to nginx.
If you're trying to identify and eliminate bottlenecks, benchmarks like this are tremendously helpful. If the theoretical limit of a component exceeds the practical limit of other resources, I know I can look elsewhere to improve performance.
