Similarly, I've noticed that people tend to get a little silly about web server requests-per-second. It really gets to the point you probably ought to be talking about seconds per request, or perhaps rather, microseconds per request or something.
Because A: as you start talking about these fast servers, you need to contemplate whether your code can run in, say, 2.5 microseconds either; who cares whether your webserver takes 2 or 25 microseconds to handle a minimal request if your minimal response requires 8 milliseconds (i.e. "8000 microseconds")? 8ms would actually be pretty decent performance for a wide variety of non-trivial web requests.
And B: As the webservers get faster and faster, you really need to start wondering what corners they cut to push their reqs/s number up. I can make a blazingly fast webserver that would actually kill nginx's performance stone dead for a "return a constant JSON string response" task... the trick is that I'm not even going to look at the incoming web request, I'm going to just receive a socket, blast out my answer as a constant string buffer without even reading from the socket, and discard the socket. (If you're feeling particularly saucy, hook that up to a user-space TCP stack so you can drop the work of properly setting up and tearing down TCP connections.) There aren't that many real-world tasks for which that is a good solution (though, non-zero!), but it'll look like pure awesomesauce on the benchmark!
Properly handling HTTP is non-trivial problem, and even moreso if it's going to be hooked up to a program rather than a static file system or something similarly easy. I actually start getting nervous about web servers that show excessively high numbers. If your performance is much better than nginx, rather than me cheering for joy, I actually have a lot of questions about how you did that exactly, and what my website's security profile looks like with your way-faster server. I'm not saying these questions are completely unanswerable; perhaps there is a way to safely do a much faster web server. I'm just saying that rather than my default response being celebration and "Oh wowzers cool!", my default reaction is a healthy dollop of skepticism.