It's not fair because you are not comparing apples to apples. I can write a poll loop that accepts and sends back http responses and call it a webserver. h2o d

It's not fair because you are not comparing apples to apples. I can write a poll loop that accepts and sends back http responses and call it a webserver. h2o doesn't even use sendfile(2) which means file data is read and copied to the userland just to be copied back to the kernel to send it to the socket buffer. Turn this on in nginx and you'll see a significant performance improvement. nginx can be tuned a lot to improve performance and the author didn't bother doing that.