racer
A Rack-compliant ruby web server. It's written in C cuz its fast.
racer is almost as fast as this car
Benchmark
The following Rack app was used benchmark WEBrick, Unicorn, Thin and Racer:
run ->env { [200, { "Content-Type" => "text/html" }, ["hello world"]] }
Tests were carried out on a 64 bit Linux VM running on an Intel Core i7 980X.
ApacheBench was used to run the benchmarks with the following options:
ab -n 10000 -c <...> http://127.0.0.1:3000/
Here are the results: