Yeah the thing is these benchmarks are measuring the bit that isn't slow. Think about it - if this were a significant benchmark and they could do a million requests a second then they could literally run 20 Googles on one machine.
Obviously they can't, and the reason is that it isn't a significant benchmark. It doesn't actually do anything.
Wholly irrelevant, just like the Python "benchmark" that was on the front page yesterday.
Irrelevant for what? It's opening and closing an unfathomable number of sockets in a short time span, so it would be limited to how many the kernel can handle. Maybe subject to limitations in the glibc epoll() wrapper as well. So it's not irrelevant if you want to benchmark some change in the kernel for example. (There is a http parser in there as well, but I don't think even replacing it with a dummy one would quadruple total throughput even. Which is why I'm skeptical. The Python thing didn't claim performance above nginx.)