so what if nginx can serve a theoretically higher number of static files/second more than something else. are you actually serving that much traffic with no headroom in terms of extra servers and load balancers? do microseconds of computational time per request really matter when your outbound packets can get delayed by milliseconds in the network or dropped completely?
there are plenty of reasons to like one server over another, but is .0000000001 seconds/request overhead really one of them? http servers can have wildly different behaviors regarding HTTP streaming, working models, extensions, etc. how about the fact that varnish is a caching proxy that doesn't really replace something like nginx, lighttpd, apache?
he's also backing varnish with a ramdisk that takes 25% of his memory (for a 100b file, no less!) when comparing it to the others. probably not the best designed test out there.
> Again, keep in mind that this benchmark compares only the servers locally (no networking is involved), and therefore the results might be misleading.
i don't know why anyone would publish "misleading" benchmarks
i know it's less fun and there are no numbers involved, but what about a real rundown of some of the subtle differences between the servers and some of their more unique features (besides async/threaded)? that's something i would find useful reading, but i guess it's not as easy as firing up ab.