It's important to note that with all these "X requests per second" benchmarks, they're almost never testing actual performance, but rather just less features. The architecture (event loop, forking, threading or any combination of those) also matters a lot, but they serve completely different purposes.

For example, they're using Apache as a reference point, but Apache does so much more than their code example. For one thing, you'll want to try disabling .htaccess support and static file serving so Apache doesn't actually hit the disk, like their code example doesn't.

I've found it trivial to make Python perform on the order of dozens of millions of requests per second, and I can keep scaling that basically indefinitely. But all I'm really testing, as is the given code example in the article, is a bit of looping and string manipulation.