The previous article showed nginx 1.0.14 performance on a dedicated server from SoftLayer. That server was chosen simply because one was available, and 24GB of RAM was completely unnecessary.
It would be more useful to publish results from an enviroment that is easy and cheap to replicate, such as Amazon EC2. The Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large Instance appears to be a good candidate with dual Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs and 60.5GB RAM. Spot prices are typically $0.54/hour.
Kernel parameters and nginx config are identical to the previous article, but EC2 instances run an Amazon Linux AMI.
Despite running one of the latest Intel CPUs, with 4 extra cores, the EC2 instance performs very poorly. Some virtualization overhead is expected, however each cc2.8xlarge instance should have an entire physical machine to itself given that the Intel Xeon E5-2670 supports a maximum of 2 CPUs.
