Synthetic benchmarks are far more subjective than actual production traffic, which is what we used to test. We ran the various configurations in production bes

Synthetic benchmarks are far more subjective than actual production traffic, which is what we used to test. We ran the various configurations in production beside one another and compared the relative performance. Is it possible that the vagaries of load distribution through our load balancers skewed the results? Sure, it's possible but it's not terribly likely with the volume of traffic we receive on a daily basis. In the end, we wanted to see a response time comparison between a few different server configurations, using our production traffic as the load. That's exactly what we ended up with.