Serving a plain HTML page over localhost via nginx. A medium length blog post with pretty much no real-world information.
I don't know if reddit could run on a single server, but this benchmark does nothing to prove it. A pageview on reddit consist of several http requests. A http requests translates into several requests into a database backend. In this syntactic benchmark he is requesting the same static file over and over again, so nginx and/or linux can cache it in memory (or CPU cache).
Also even if they could put reddit on a single server, it would require a lot of optimization and engineering time is more expensive than hardware. It would also make adding new futures in the future a pain in ass, because you would have to be very greedy with CPU time (and other resources like memory, bandwidth, etc...). Also you want a multi-server setup for redundancy and handling extra capacity.
EDIT: I don't if you also planning to put the database on the same server? Web servers are basically stateless so they are easy to scale. It would be interesting to calculate how much disks that server would need just to handle the IO throughput.
Full disclosure: This is some speaking who used to work for social network with 9M users and 3,000 servers.
Serving over multiple 10GE to front end cache servers physically colocated with it would be realistic -- not sure how much of a hit that would be vs. over localhost.
Static vs. dynamic content is a reasonable optimization to make for an application under heavy load.
http://ark.intel.com/compare/47920,37147
The Softlayer server is a Xeon, the Hetzner is a desktop grade processor.
Key differences for me
* Cache
* QPI (especially in a 2P config that makes a difference)
* Max TDP ... that's a HUGE one.
* ECC memory. See http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/02/26/ObservationsOnEr... for why this is important
So, you're not comparing apples to apples
You can get a dual E5-2609 with 32gb of ram + bandwidth from a good host like WebNX for $369 / month.
And if you wanted to spend $1k per month, you can get a dual e5-2687W (16 cores @ 3.1ghz) with 128gb ram; with a 4x SAS RAID 10, plus a 120gb ssd drive, plus a 2tb backup freebie, plus 100mbps unmetered bandwidth (30tb). That literally blows the doors off Softlayer.
There is nothing new in "modern HTTP servers". They are event-driven programs and this has existed for a long time.
Hence in telcom environments where you get such requirements the TCP/IP stack is processed closer to the card - but no out-of-the-box web servers could handle such streams - most of that is handled with e.g. C-libs closely bound to the networking HW.
With such specialized NW cards (16 core card) plus libs you get to > 1'500'000 teardowns p.s. / connections established and roughly 15Gbps - there are now 100Gbps solutions on the market on the top-end - your actual throughput depends mostly what kind of processing you're doing. That kind of equipment is of course not normally used for web serving - more for (transparent) proxying and inspection / traffic shaping, etc as more-and-more telcom cores are completely TCP/IP based.
Granted this is also being tested on localhost with static content (no disk I/O) -- but shows that event-driven servers are not that novel or difficult to write: my code weighs around 1700 LOC of (might I say) readable C.
Static file serving is also fast (using sendfile(), etc), but needs an overhaul to achieve usable concurrency. Currently there's a ~4x performance drop while serving files, but I'm working on this.
(The sources are at http://github.com/lpereira/lwan by the way.)
