Stefan,
As I said you hit bottle neck and it is not pound - if you want to find the problem in pound try testing in environment
that will put the load  on the pound itself not app web server or DB.
Not sure if you went through my test numbers. I was consistently able to run the same test against the web server directly with no noticeable issues. I also ran the test from the pound machine against the web server to verify that there are no issues in the connection between the pound box and the web server and there were no issues.

But I can confirm that I notice something similar using ab for benchmarking. Now I'm trying to setup
good environment where I can test/benchmark pound.
would be interested to see what your results look like.

Also note that you do not use -k (keep-alive) and most browsers do! :)
good point. I'll re-run with that to see how it impacts the results.

Khaled

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Khaled Hassounah | MedHelp