There are basically three sorts of traffic that I have experience with and would expect to be the major portion of whatever goes over the web:
- underwater ajax requests
- regular website content (images, dynamic html, css and other relatively small (say < 250K) files)
- media servers (filedumps, video servers, streaming audio servers)
Each of those requires fairly specific tuning of the TCP stack to get the most out of it, so you're not likely going to find all of these on one and the same machine unless it is a small operation (and in that case this whole discussion is moot).
A benchmark done in isolation is meaningless because in the end, real world traffic is what it is all about. So, I personally don't care whose site(s) you test with, as long as there are enough of them to get a statistically valid result.
Google's or Yahoo's would be fine with me, I've given my results above, if I have the time I'll do the same thing on a couple of other high volume sites.
I've (unfortunately) studied this problem quite a bit because of the size of the websites that I'm involved with and so far I've learned that you can play around on your testbench all day long it doesn't matter one little bit for production purposes unless you are very careful (such as in that other test linked from this page) to simulate users clients.
You could do a lot worse than to play back a log file in order to make an experiment repeatable. I assume that real world performance is what Zed is after, not theoretical performance.
