Are there any updated benchmarks/feature comparisons between nginx/uWSGI vs. nginx/gunicorn out there?
The great thing about uWSGI/Nginx over Gunicorn/Nginx is that Nginx speaks the uwsi protocol natively[2], whereas with Gunicorn Nginx acts as a proxy.
Also, in my experience (2 years with gunicorn, 1 with uwsgi in prod), uwsgi is more stable, uses less memory, has better management and configuration tools and even lets you run multiple Python apps under the same intepreter (multitenancy) [3].
[1] http://www.peterbe.com/plog/fcgi-vs-gunicorn-vs-uwsgi
[2] http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpUwsgiModule
[3] http://projects.unbit.it/uwsgi/wiki/TipsAndTricks
(Edit: formatting)
Servers do matter - memory usage, throughput, error rate, concurrent request handling etc. If the options are to use a faster server, or hunt down your code for bottlenecks, the choice is clear. Even if I modify my code to be faster, a faster server doesn't hurt.
This "benchmarks are useless" meme is overdone. "Hello World" benchmarks don't matter, but if a server is significantly faster on my real world application, why would that benchmark be meaningless for me?
I currently run DUNG (nginx/gunicorn), perhaps I will run nginx/uWSGI first and compare performance. I will ping you if I get around to it.