I've seen benchmarks using `ab` for PHP run at around 500 requests per second and upwards of 1200 per second for Python. Note, however, that these are basic requests that don't really do anything spectacular. So really, your bottleneck will be your server code: It's definitely possible to reach 1k requests per second using Apache/FastCGI/C++, it all depends on your server hardware and complexity of your server code though (and server-side I/O, etc). --- On a side note, is there a reason that you're using this particular tech stack? C++ usually isn't a very nice language to write server code in (as opposed to Java, etc). I might also look at a language like Erlang for server-side code to get around the FastCGI requirement to give your server even more of a boost.