Benchmarks are done using apache bench:
/usr/sbin/ab -n 10000 -c ${CONCURRENCY} http://localhost/index.html

index.html is a 11013 byte document

c11n used (basically the default, no tuning was done of max_threads):
shttp {
        min_sessions = 10
        max_sessions = 2000
        max_threads = 30
        min_threads = 1
        address = "0.0.0.0"
        port = 8080
        backlog = 32
        doc_root = "/var/www"
        default_index = "index.html"
        mime_types = "/etc/mime.types"
}

All other servers were basically apt-get installed on debian etch and run with
defaults, serving from the same docroot.


Concurrency	Server		Requests/sec (mean) (higher is better)
--------------------------------------------
1		apache1		1126.70
1		apache2		3648.39
1		thttpd		4134.36
1		boa		4210.79
1		nginx		5012.20
1		shttp		5963.74

2		apache1		1260.90
2		apache2		3814.19
2		thttpd		4325.19
2		boa		4330.00
2		nginx		5333.67
2		shttp		6360.21

10		apache1		1148.51
10		apache2		3974.31
10		boa		4363.59
10		thttpd		4468.40
10		nginx		5689.92
10		shttp		6681.55

50		apache1		1141.85
50		boa		3783.83
50		apache2		3788.69
50		thttpd		3917.50
50		nginx		5583.05
50		shttp		6802.48

100		apache1		1053.42
100		boa		3152.71
100		thttpd		3339.52
100		apache2		3607.33
100		nginx		5360.13
100		shttp		6498.06

200		apache1		1127.98
200		boa		2487.21
200		thttpd		2709.41
200		apache2		3427.71
200		nginx		5028.65
200		shttp		5925.80

500		apache1		1239.41
500		boa		1532.22
500		thttpd		2409.83
500		apache2		2754.68
500		nginx		4289.32
500		shttp		4932.78

1000		apache2		605.62
1000		boa		625.48
1000		apache1		953.91
1000		thttpd		2481.70
1000		nginx		3678.88
1000		shttp		4032.43