Bear in mind that the Apache projects stated goals aren't to maximise performance.
Their resaoning is along the lines of 'our server is fast enough on a half-decent machine to saturate a T1/T3 so there's little gain in going all out to make it go faster.'
Certainly in terms of webserver performance it isn't necessarily realistic to load a machine with four 100MBit network cards which you then hit as hard as you can, that's equivalent connectivity to 9 T3s.
But the apache attitude is 'we want our server to be able to handle the needs of all webmasters as well as we can' not 'we want our server to get good benchmarks in artificial conditions.'
There are servers out there which can outperform apache, but it's harder to compete on the sheer range of things apache can do.
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Their resaoning is along the lines of 'our server is fast enough on a half-decent machine to saturate a T1/T3 so there's little gain in going all out to make it go faster.'
Certainly in terms of webserver performance it isn't necessarily realistic to load a machine with four 100MBit network cards which you then hit as hard as you can, that's equivalent connectivity to 9 T3s.
But the apache attitude is 'we want our server to be able to handle the needs of all webmasters as well as we can' not 'we want our server to get good benchmarks in artificial conditions.'
There are servers out there which can outperform apache, but it's harder to compete on the sheer range of things apache can do.
However, I liked the Compaq one. Especially the way they actually put up a Shockwave game and everything.