Update 1 (Mar 29, 2011): Logging and compression now disabled for all servers
Update 2 (Apr 14, 2011): Added results for Nginx 1.0
Introduction
The goal of this benchmark is to compare several web server or caching server regarding their respective ability and performance to server small static files. The servers are optimized, contrary to my previous benchmark, where each server was tested using its default settings. I consider in this benchmark only the most performant open source servers, namely Varnish Cache, Nginx, Lighttpd, Apache Traffic Server as well as G-WAN (free, but not open source), as it was the clear winner of the previous test.
Spoot! 