Yeah these numbers seem way off. I did some stress tests for my thesis and was able to get 20-90 requests per second served from a Raspberry Pi 2 running a PHP website with a PostgreSQL database, depending on the complexity of the page. An equivalent site programmed in Elixir fared even better. With plain Nginx serving a static HTML file, I could hit 1000 requests per second.

So it does seem the bottleneck here is the writer's Internet connection.

TLS probably adds significant latency here. Was your 1k RPS with TLS?

People measuring RPS (requests per second) are rarely measuring CPS (connections per second), so the TLS setup overhead would be amortized across numerous requests.

A single webpage will often load a number of asset files over the same underlying connection, so it's not like CPS is the single, entirely accurate measure and RPS is just bad or something... they're both valid, interesting numbers.

Even then, TLS setup isn't that expensive, in my opinion. Someone else here mentioned 35% overhead from TLS on a Raspberry Pi, which seems high to me... but it would still be orders of magnitude better performance than what the original article on this thread was claiming.

It was not. I don't think it would bog the RPi down to 2–3 requests per second though.

Hah! I worked at a startup that deployed several E450's (and their smaller cousins, the E250's.) It's amazing how far we've come with hardware.