And this other version that doesn't check for "\r\n\r\n" is 47% faster than his "node.js+net" case. This should translate to about 42000 queries/sec on his machine:

  var net = require('net');
  var server = net.createServer(function (stream) {
   stream.on('connect', function () {});
   stream.on('data', function (data) {
       stream.write('HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\nConnection: Keep-Alive\r\nContent-Type: text/html\r\nContent-Length: 13\r\n\r\nHello World\r\n');
   });
   stream.on('end', function () {stream.end();});
  });
  server.listen(8124, 'localhost');