It's hard to know what you're actually testing without profiling. My guess is it's only the overhead of netty and lamina at play here, and not clojure itself.

It's hard to know what you're actually testing without profiling. My guess is it's only the overhead of netty and lamina at play here, and not clojure itself. There are profiling facilities to know for sure, and the author should try to check that out. I can get like 8k request/s from clojure with jetty last time I tried.