The general point of these benchmarks is not to resemble a full production app, but to provide a baseline measurement. From the original blog post[1]: This exe

The general point of these benchmarks is not to resemble a full production app, but to provide a baseline measurement. From the original blog post[1]: This exercise aims to provide a "baseline" for performance across the variety of frameworks. By baseline we mean the starting point, from which any real-world application's performance can only get worse. We aim to know the upper bound being set on an application's performance per unit of hardware by each platform and framework. But we also want to exercise some of the frameworks' components such as its JSON serializer and data-store/database mapping. While each test boils down to a measurement of the number of requests per second that can be processed by a single server, we are exercising a sample of the components provided by modern frameworks, so we believe it's a reasonable starting point. So, yes, these benchmarks should not be the only factor in choosing a framework, but they do provide a possibly important data point (depending on the specific scenario). [1] http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/03/28/frameworks-round-1/ http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/03/28/frameworks-round-...