Guys, don't link to the community wiki, it contains a lot of obsolete or just wrong information. Always use official documentation: http://nginx.org/en/docs/
And, yet, running the same test on my own varnish server yields 33k requests/sec with 50 concurrent requests and 28k requests/sec with 200 concurrent requests.
Something tells me that perhaps Tod Sul is doing something wrong.
Amount of donations on this page: http://nginx.org/en/donation.html is really suck.