Some providers, notably Amazon, are tuning some sysctl in a way that usually help benchmarks (that's not the primary purpose of those modifications). For exampl

Some providers, notably Amazon, are tuning some sysctl in a way that usually help benchmarks (that's not the primary purpose of those modifications). For example, increasing default and maximum socket memory usage may help with network related benchmarks. That's the case with Amazon. Providers keeping the default values are put at a disadvantage. On the other hand, ab against a local Apache is known to be totally random.