As this benchmark shows, pronghorn 0.8 outperforms lighttpd and nginx with ease. Apache is beaten as well, but it's like taking candy from a baby.

A 10 kilobyte sized file has been served 10,000 times at 6 concurrency levels (1, 10, 100, 200, 500 up to 1000 simultaneous requests). As this benchmark shows, pronghorn performs best at 100 concurrent requests (handling ~55,000 requests/s) in this scenario. The requests have been generated using ApacheBench (ab) on a Linux 2.6 system with the following specs:

• Intel Xeon X3220
• 8 GB DDR2-800 ECC RAM
• 2x Samsung HD103HJ @ RAID-1
• 3ware 9650SE-2LP RAID controller
• chassis/board/power supply: Dell PowerEdge R200 (shouldn't matter)

The server side was powered by another Xen domU on the same physical machine (with just 1GB of RAM).

software versions used:

• Linux 2.6.26
• pronghorn 0.8 (single-threaded, epoll, sendfile)
• lighttpd 1.4.19 (epoll, sendfile)
• nginx 0.7.62
• Apache 2.2.12 (worker mpm)

But, as nice as this might look like, be aware that pronghorn 0.8 isn't stable yet and the final performance might slightly differ from these results.