I literally have systems with tweaked setting doing 45k/second hits at less then 10ms latency on Apache. You can't do that with default settings because again the brain dead default settings.

I think in general tuning each of these carefully could eek out more performance on any platform especially one with such a small footprint.

Edit: Yes, it's "possible" that this is something in the nginx code causing it work weird, but I'd say a benchmarker should use some common sense instead of blind reporting, notice that this is an anomaly, and re-test. Benchmarking should be a scientific statistical process, reporting mean and mode, standard deviation, etc. The background environment should be heavily studied and documented to ascertain no background/cron tasks are taking place, and every little detail should be carefully looked at before putting results up for the world to see.

I really like to "out-of-the-box" comparison, but as others already have stated for apache that doesn't really make sense because apache just doesn't perform well without any configuration changes.

Also it would have been nice to see some low-power x86 system for comparison.