I don't understand the benchmark completely (there seem to be some web server or "network programming framework" mingled with web frameworks? wut?), by the way

I don't understand the benchmark completely (there seem to be some web server or "network programming framework" mingled with web frameworks? wut?), by the way I'm sure that pure speed is not Spring best virtue, and it's not Java's either, unless you take care at pre-warming the JIT and you've got enough RAM (and I suppose that, even then, Spring would be slower than other, 'shallower' frameworks). Spring makes it easy and fast to develop web applications, AND evolve them in time. A lot of things are ready out of the box, but you can easily customize many, many parts of your application when and if you actually need it, substituting what the framework would do for what YOU actually need. I haven't found anything like that, yet, in other web frameworks (admittedly: there's tons out there, so I probably tried 1% of them).