I mean, I get your point, but adjectives don't exist in a vacuum. If everything is fast, everything is slow too, and nothing is fast too, because everything is the same. When you use an adjective like "fast" or "slow", you're separating yourself from the whole, and you're putting the thing you're talking about in a category. Of course this is relative. You can be a fast marathon runner. You can be a fast human. Or a fast animal. Or a fast car, or plane. All of those have vastly different speed. But they still have meaning.

Now, Caddy is a web server. You say that it's fast and efficient. I'm not putting that into question. But what do you base that on? What would it take for Caddy to be judged as "slow" or "inefficient" by you? Maybe you don't have a precise answer, and that's perfectly okay. But you must have a way to evalute what's slow and what's fast, even when not comparing to other product. At least that's how I (and I assume, the people asking you all these questions) think.

> This discourse makes me exhausted, every time it comes up. I'm tired of everyone thinking I'm trying to outperform NGINX.

That's fair, and I can empathize. However, I think that's what will happen when the first thing people see on the website of Caddy is "THE ULTIMATE SERVER". Ultimate, for a good amount of people, is related to performance, so people are going to ask you about that. And when they don't get a clear answer, they're going to get frustrated.

Again, I'm not trying to be confrontational here. But there seems to be a real lack of understanding in this conversation, and I'm trying to clarify what people mean when they ask about Caddy's performance.

Then what do they mean to you? I think people are just trying to understand. What is "fast" and "efficient" to you? Where do you draw the line?

When it comes to tech in particular, things are pretty much always compared relative to each other, because there's very little other reference points. React is generally deemed as slow relative to Svelte. Rust is more efficient than Python at runtime. These claims mean very little in a vacuum, in fact I'd say that they are almost pointless. You can't base you business decisions on claims that haven't been backed up by data. And if you do, you might regret them later on.