the benchmark still has to run somewhere :) and it takes up CPU as well. running both the server and benchmark on one CPU reduces performance dramatically. On

the benchmark still has to run somewhere :) and it takes up CPU as well. running both the server and benchmark on one CPU reduces performance dramatically. On a 2 core EC2 machine the results are much closer. However if you ran the benchmark from a remote node, you can really compare apples to apples. But given that they both cost more or less the same, having one CPU still sucks just the same.