The comments on this post are worth reading. It's impossible to construct a meaningful synthetic benchmark without more rigor about what client is being used, how it's configured, how the OS is tuned, testing against actual files (rather than a "Hello World" 100 byte file), details on default tuning for each webserver, and finally what exactly is intended to be tested and what is in fact being tested.<p>A great post on the subject from mnot:<p><a href="http://www.mnot.net/blog/2011/05/18/http_benchmark_rules" rel="nofollow">http://www.mnot.net/blog/2011/05/18/http_benchmark_rules</a>
Newer benchmark from the same author:<p><a href="http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/serving-small-static-files-which-server-to-use/" rel="nofollow">http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/serving-small-static...</a><p>This GWAN thing looks rather interesting. A bunch more benchmarks can be found on <a href="http://gwan.com/" rel="nofollow">http://gwan.com/</a>.