[batista]

Each deployment is unique, making benchmarks pretty useless.

Not that unique, as in snowflake-unique. There are several classes of deployments, that's all. A lot of things are similar.

That said, benchmarks still say a lot, when the performance gets over some limit. A 10-50% speed improvement could be alleviated with a different config. Even a 100%. I doubt a 10x one could. Or 1/5 the memory usage. Or getting to 20,000 rps on the same otherwise setup, while the other server stuggles after 4000 reqs.

[lrobb]

You've got think about all of the specifics though...

Here's apache tuned to serve static files of 50kb in length, with 20 requests per client, 500 uniques per hour...

vs.

Here's apache tuned to serve a wordpress blog that gets 500 uniques per hour and each client makes 50 requests (average time on site is 5 minutes)...

and then...

apache serving wordpress on a VPS vs apache serving wordpress on a single core vs apache serving wordpress on a quad-core..

and oh-wait... if we're talking php then let's consider prefork/FastCGI/yada yada yada

The "problem" (or as I prefer to look at it: feature) with Apache, is that it's been around for so long, that it can accommodate all of the above specific issues.