Hi I heighten everybody's mood I'll post some positive news. After some optimizations in both Seaside and AJP I managed to break 8000 requests / sec with a single Pharo 1.3 image. Thanks to SystemProfiler I knew where to look. This is with a single request handler that just returns a two byte response. It doesn't involve any rendering, sessions, continuations or whatsoever but it kicks on the full Seaside request handling machinery with a request context and everything. I'm using WASmallRequestHandler from the Seaside-Benchmark package. WASmallRequestHandler >> #handleFiltered: aRequestContext aRequestContext respond: [ :response | response binary; contentType: WAMimeType textHtml; nextPutAll: 'OK' asByteArray ] Apache 2.2.21 mpm_worker mod_proxy_ajp CPU Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E7500 @ 2.93GHz SmalltalkImage current vmVersion 'Croquet Closure Cog VM [CoInterpreter VMMaker.oscog-eem.138]' Attached you'll find the output of ApacheBench. Cheers Philippe