1. Misrepresentation
The title says 'Apache vs Litespeed', when in reality it is 'Varnish vs Litespeed', Apache has nothing to do with this particular benchmark.
2. Questionable results
Varnish serving 217.05 req/sec for a static page at 100 concurrency level? Something is seriously messed up in the setup; Varnish can easily handle thousands of req/s for something as simple as looking up a cache entry and returning a static file for 100 clients. Oh wait, 11177.99 [Kbytes/sec] - looks like you saturated the pipe, making it a test of how fast your network is, and nothing to do with Varnish.
3. Flawed benchmark testing procedure
You can't expect a simple `ab -c 100 -n 10000` to provide any insight whatsoever towards the general handling of a server. The only thing obvious is that Litespeed has been saturated with 100 concurrent connections. If you're going to do a benchmark, you must post varying concurrency levels at least (along with exact setup configurations). Likewise, cpu and memory usage are just as important to providing valuable insight.
4. Comparing apples to oranges
I'm not entirely sure what Litespeed is doing (eg. does it cache statically?) since you haven't specified it exactly, but considering that almost 70% of the requests failed and almost all requests after the first few had a different content length, I would assume that Litespeed is returning a dynamic request each time, whereas Varnish is returning a static file. I have no doubt in my mind that if you ran the same scenario (ie. Litespeed serving a static file as well) the results would be much different.
5. Irrelevant to the article benchmark
Saying "But Nginx is a bit slower than Varnish", then linking to a terrible irrelevant benchmark and using circular logic (based on another completely crap Litespeed vs Nginx for serving php!? benchmark) to infer that Varnish is faster than nginx hurts my brain.
I ran a really simple benchmark on Varnish 2.1.3 and nginx 0.8.49's proxy_cache directive on a single url; nginx is faster.
However, what if we test a heavy config with a bunch of complicated rules? Varnish's VCL compiles straight to C and might give it the edge in those cases. What if we use test a million different urls and really test how each one handles their cache hit/miss procedures. How do they fare under real world scenarios where thousands of different clients on various connection speeds are connected? I know nginx is damn efficient memory wise when dealing with a load of keepalives.
6. Conclusion
Good benchmarks are difficult.