Irrelevant for what? It's opening and closing an unfathomable number of sockets in a short time span, so it would be limited to how many the kernel can handle. Maybe subject to limitations in the glibc epoll() wrapper as well. So it's not irrelevant if you want to benchmark some change in the kernel for example. (There is a http parser in there as well, but I don't think even replacing it with a dummy one would quadruple total throughput even. Which is why I'm skeptical. The Python thing didn't claim performance above nginx.)