I agree with Voidlogic here. Perhaps his tone was a little confrontational, but his intentions were good. :)

    Go 1.1 > Go 1.0.2
    wrk > ab

In particular, ab should be avoided whenever possible. Apache Bench (ab) remains a single-threaded tool, meaning that for high-performance servers in particular, your exercise will run into the limits of Apache Bench before the limits of the server(s) being tested. The LigHTTP team has a multi-threaded clone named WeigHTTP that I would recommend if you want something that is functionally similar to ab and uses similar command-line arguments.

Wrk uses a slightly different argument syntax from ab and WeigHTTP but has some upsides:

1. Wrk is also multi-threaded.

2. In our experience, wrk is slightly higher-performance than WeigHTTP (~5 to 10%).

3. Wrk provides average, maximum, and stdev for latency.

4. Wrk provides a time-limited mode (rather than request-count limited), which is appealing for some test types.

In my experience, as long as you configure Go and node to use all of your cores, Go will benchmark better than Node in any permutation of these configuration variables:

    Go 1.0.2 and node tested with ab.
    Go 1.1 and node tested with ab.
    Go 1.0.2 and node tested with wrk.
    Go 1.1 and node tested with wrk.

V8 is a very fast JavaScript runtime; node.js is modestly quick at handling HTTP requests. But among the many features of Go is a high-performance HTTP package. If you've used both, it isn't all that surprising that Go's performance clocks in higher than node.