Benchmarks that are not completely anecdotal are really hard to produce. For starters you need the following... 1. Don't run the client on the same server. If

Benchmarks that are not completely anecdotal are really hard to produce. For starters you need the following... 1. Don't run the client on the same server. If you do, you have no business trying to test for high concurrency. Isolate the variables. 2. Size of file you are serving. Are you close to saturating your connection between the client and server? Most of the time this is the case. 3. Concurrency is hard to test because most of the time the client is the problem in the test. Don't use apache bench for anything like this as it's high concurrency is much to be desired. 4. A lot of other details need to be compared to make a benchmark useful. Are you using keepalives on both/or not. Nginx workers/processes vs apache threads/clients. Are you comparing apples to apples? How's your TCPIP backlog in a case like this? What kind of IO model are you running on each? Are you using sendfile on both or only one? Nginx is a great server, and probably a better choice for static files, but data like this is like saying, "the other day I saw a some kind of Honda pass some kind of Nissan". No useful information to infer about either.