I just don't think you're ever going to be able to beat nginx on the webserver end of things because you have to contend with the PHP garbage collector and ngin

I just don't think you're ever going to be able to beat nginx on the webserver end of things because you have to contend with the PHP garbage collector and nginx does manual memory management. And...well, C is a lot faster than PHP. I fixed the backlog setting and re-ran the test, and pancake doesn't drop requests anymore, but it's not improved at all on speed. https://gist.github.com/4063785 https://gist.github.com/4063785 I was watching top during each test, as well, to get a sense of what was happening; pancake was pegging the CPU at close to 100% user and reached a load average of ~14, whereas the mod_php test was something like 85% user/15% system and reached a load average of 5. This would seem to indicate to me that Pancake is handling something that Apache/mod_php is able to hand off to the kernel, and since it's stuck in userspace, processes end up waiting around for their turn to do stuff. 90 req/sec really isn't bad - especially considering that without APC, my install gets ~35 req/sec - but given that it seems to get most of its boost from avoiding re-evaluation of the source files, and given that APC does the same, I don't think it's really all that fair to compare Pancake to a PHP install not running APC, especially since Pancake requires a specially-compiled version of PHP and has to be run as root, so anyone that can run Pancake can install and use APC. Additionally, APC transparently works across all your source files already - it has no manifests to maintain, so turning it on is literally as easy as "pecl install apc" and enabling the extension in your config. That's a difficult combination to beat. If you can do it, I'd love to see the results, but given what I know of the architecture of these various pieces, I'm skeptical that it can be done with pure PHP. Finally, I think that trying to contend with nginx from a marketing standpoint is silly, because web applications are composed of much more than just PHP files; I have to be able to serve images, stylesheets, Javascript, and the like for a full web application, so I have to consider the performance of the webserver as a whole in terms of its ability to fully deliver a page to a client to evaluate it properly; a webserver that runs the script end of things, but then struggles to serve up my assets (and even worse, blocks workers serving assets while I have script requests pending) isn't going to be very useful in a practical scenario. I performed my benchmarks with my development Apache install; I can tell you from my own experience that nginx will trounce it solidly, so the gap to overcome is almost certainly substantially wider than in my benchmarks. Considered as a whole, from first-byte to request-fully-delivered, I don't think you're going to be able to approach nginx, let alone beat it, without moving major parts of the application out of PHP and into a lower-level system.