Reference: http://antirez.com/post/scalability-and-speed-of-web-apps.html

This repo shows an example of how to boot using rackup in a mode that doesn't
waste time doing HTTP and Rack Spec validation.

It pulls 1600r/s on Thin, or around 1300r/s on Mongrel, admittedly on a 2011
MBP. ruby 1.8.7 (2011-02-18 patchlevel 334) [i686-darwin10] sinatra-1.2.1
rack-1.2.2.

I'm afraid I couldn't be bothered to setup Apache or configure my local nginx
to service php through fcgi. It would be trivial to add a nginx.conf to this
repo to demo the two.

I'm not trying to defend ruby's performance, I'm just providing a base.