It took your comment to make me notice it wasn't 30k requests/second but minute instead. 500 requests per second is what I would expect of a default PHP + Apac

It took your comment to make me notice it wasn't 30k requests/second but minute instead. 500 requests per second is what I would expect of a default PHP + Apache installation on a small Ubuntu server. I too have a hard time grasping whats special here. For example I saw cached Wordpress setups handle 400 to 500 requests per second. And Wordpress isn't known for performance even with caching plugins.