I did a bunch of these benchmarks a while back and the most important factor in a performance test like this is the VM/Language environment. Simply calling into

I did a bunch of these benchmarks a while back and the most important factor in a performance test like this is the VM/Language environment. Simply calling into a VM on every IO request will rapidly destroy performance no matter what your IO setup looks like. Erlang's IO stack if just fantastic for this and is generally very well optimized. If you want to go even faster you can code the fast path in C/C++ and call out to a higher level language as needed. A little dated but helpful: http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet-application-with-mochiweb-part-1 http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet-applica... I think that Webbit is also pretty good, this benchmark is little contrived.