Is there such a thing as speed of a web server?

[technossomy]

Have been looking into web servers that are able to handle high loads and came (among others) across this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_servers

My question regards performance. Some of the web server originators speak of their web server as being very fast, but how is speed measured for a web server? Could one rank web servers in terms of transactions per second for a benchmark test set on a benchmark machine?

Thanks in advance


Tech

[technossomy]

A google search yields quite a bit of information, among which the following article which also goes into some of the methodology used:
http://www.lighttpd.net/benchmark/