Hi whalesalad. First, thank you for such a thoughtful and long reply. Second, you have an awesome handle.

Indeed, database connections are a huge pain point for web applications. In our tests, Django does not yet use a connection pool. We hope that is addressed soon either (a) by usage of a MySQL connection pool or (b) by implementation of a Postgres suite of tests, which are planned. We don't have an ETA on either of those, but option (a) could be completed by a pull request if anyone has time.

We've attempted to be consistent with database connection pooling. The Rails test runs in production mode and uses 256 connections in its pool [1].

Gemini is our in-house closed-source framework. We have been debating internally whether we are comfortable open sourcing it. It is not documented sufficiently for third-party use and we do not have the capacity to support its use by third-parties. On the other hand, we believe open sourcing it is the fair thing to do because we have included it here and other frameworks' fans should be able to examine it. We're still hemming and hawing over that. All that said, it is not a bare-metal framework [2].

My very strong opinion is that Node is not doing well because of its support for asynchronous application design, but rather because the V8 runtime that Node executes on is simply fast. I say that because the client-side concurrency is already sufficient to saturate the CPU cores using most frameworks (the exceptions being those that appear to have some lock or resource contention preventing full CPU utilization). Server-side concurrency fan-out strategies such as asynchronous evented loops may help superficially for our database tests, but pale in comparison to simply having a fast platform. I've written my opinions on that matter on my personal blog [3] (it's a later section of that blog entry).

None of the JSON tests are asynchronous. All respond immediately within the handler code.

I agree that it would be still more valuable to have additional dimensions for attributes such as the particular JSON serializer, the particular ORM, the particular database driver. With enough time, I'd love to have that breadth. The project has been steadily growing in scope, but handling that level of minor variations I fear remains quite a ways out. The priority right now is introducing new tests that include more representative functionality such as working with collections and server-side templates [4].

I'm not sure if your comment about PHP opcode caching is meant to suggest that we are not using it, but based on feedback prior to Round 2, we enabled APC for PHP, and that has remained enabled in this round [5].

I am not a part of the Play project, but I agree with your sentiment that Play deserves a good look by anyone starting a new web application. I've been especially impressed by their community. They have embraced this benchmark project and are helping us make sure Play performs as well as possible--with a fair and reasonable production-grade configuration. Their fans have given us some good advice and constructive criticism.

Finally, thanks so much for the kind words at the end of your comment. It means a lot to us that the community finds value in this project. We've been thrilled with the response. On the other hand, we've been absolutely murdered by the moderators here. This item had a massive HN Slapdown score, and we weren't even responsible for posting it. :)

[1] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...

[2] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...

[3] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/rps-vs-connections

[4] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/issues/13...

[5] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=environment