Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hell, it would have been great if they had used a real closed testbed on a local network instead of AWS. That would give you reproducible test results that aren't influenced by things like communal server resources and a communal network. Regardless, they put zero thought into what makes each application work to its peak performance and just picked two random configurations, probably based on defaults that we know to…
Call me stupid. But maybe Apache shouldn't ship defaults that have poor performance ?
Well stupid, Apache ships with the default settings it does for historical expectations of its users. But the application's tuning is driven largely by how you use it, as there are several workers for Apache that all are useful in different situations and require vastly different configuration options. This is to say nothing of the kernel options which also need to be tuned to the application.
The defaults are just defaults. They need to be changed to improve performance.