17 is a bit small for such a machine. I just ran ab -c 20 -n 5000 (20 concurrent connections/5000 total) on Linux 6.2 and PIII 600 Mhz laptopt/256 MB ram and I guess very slow IDE disk), AOLServer 4 beta1/OpenACS 4/Postgres 7.1.2. I got 1100 req/sec for a pure .html, it fell down to 420 req/sec when I used nsvhr/nssock.
More to the point, I got 21 req/sec for a simple OpenACS 4 page that, I believe, did at least one db hit to verify permissions. ab was run on the same machine as web server/db. Those are very simplistic measures, so take them with appropriate grain of salt.
Conclusion: my machine is way worse than yours yet it did better. The only difference is: platform and version of AOLServer used but I would be surprised if this did matter that much. Maybe I botched my benchmarks.
Anyone has other results for OpenACS 4?
