This was stock RHEL 5, I tested nginx compiled with gcc -O2, -O3, -O2 -ffast-math epoll was enabled, I even specified the cache line size at build time and tested hard enabling AIO the nginx config consisted of simply serving a simple static html page. I tried every option under the sun at the time tcp_nopush, etc. I spent days testing apache vs nginx vs litespeed, instead of drinking the kool aid.