This micro-benchmark makes sense. It's benchmarking an HTTP server essentially. Any benchmark further than this would really be benchmarking the JVM and V8. While that would be interesting, I think in this case, this micro benchmark is OK as long as you know its limitations.
The reality is that most people's app code and databases are going to bottleneck long before either Vert.x or Node.js do. The main thing this benchmark clears up is that both of them are really, really, fast, and that if you do lots of simple to process responses you may want to go with Vert.x.
Kind-of true. But to give any results that can be applied to the real world, it would have to use a much larger payload than a hello world.
http://blog.yafla.com/Pet_Store_2011__Metrics_Instead_of_Eva...
These micro-benchmarks aren't even a good kicking off point for comparisons, as the things that yield a trivial benchmark win are often the things that yield significant performance troubles at scale.
There should be a larger application that even remotely resembles some kind of real world usage. Maybe some day we'll have some kind of a "standard" for a web framework benchmark, an application that actually does something so it's worth benchmarking.