Does “Request per second” performance matter for Web apps?

If does matter, can it stand on it´s own? Shouldn´t it be coupled to the underlying software´s development agility (Time-to-Market, Maintainability, Changeability, Beautifullibility ). My view is that it doesn´t really matter if your framework can do 200 or 400 requests per second (for a given testcase on identical hardware). Usually you´ll find that the human factor is much more important. If you base your work on a framwork that is easy and consistent to use, you´ll produce more readable and less error prone software.

The second thing that I see is the rise of cloud computing offers. Microsoft is ramping up azure which is really easy to use with ASP.NET/Vs2008. There is Google´s AppEngine (which soon will hopefully support Grails and Groovy) and Value-added-service providers like mor.ph and stax. mor-ph and stax deploy and monitor apps on amazon´s widely successful elastic cloud offerings. All of this makes scalability a breeze and puts an even stronger emphazis on agile, developer-friendly frameworks like Groovy and Grails… even if they come at a cost of a lower “rpc”.