I'm not surprised in either case.  Our httpd has never been sped up.  It
runs a separate process for each request and caches nothing.  I never
looked inside apache so I don't know what it does.

When you said that you'ld set the listen qlen to 10, how did you do that
in Plan 9?  Ours is fixed at 5 (a mistake which I will correct as soon as
I'm back home for a while).  You can increase it by changing the constant
Maxincall in /sys/src/9/ip/ip.h.

Given that you were constantly fetching the same file, I doubt that much
of the time was the file server process.  I'm assuming that you mounted
the file server cached.