What kind of performance do you actually need? Can your network connection actually sustain the bandwidth of your synthetic benchmarks?
This is just an exercise at the moment, so no particular performance goal beyond "how fast can it go".
(tested using apache-bench, loopback interface, amd64 @ 2.2GHz) With cached content 450k: with 1 concurrent client: 760 requests per second ~1ms latency 34Mb/s [...] Obviously this is testing with a loopback network. My point is, it's serving at a rather higher rate than most real network connections I could buy (except local ethernet networks).
My requests and responses are fairly small, a typical request is 29bytes and a typical response is 58bytes. If you just count these payloads its about 390kB/sec for 4.5kreq/sec and 1.2MB/sec for 13.5kreq/sec (of course its more like double these as the TCP overhead will be about the same size). Anyway, with such small sizes, the performance shouldn't be limited by the bandwidth (I dont think). If this was a back-end storage server, the network probably wouldn't be the limiting factor.
Duncan
Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/