lighttpd does 26 req/s on a static file

[Pat Maddox]

I'm getting 26 req/s on a static file.  Not sure why it's so slow, I
could really use some help.  Running lighty 1.4.10 on FreeBSD 6.0.
Server is a basically unused AMD Barton 3000+ with a gig of RAM, hosted
at a data center.

-bash-2.05b$ ab -c 9 -n 500 http://72.21.52.134/hello.html

Benchmarking 72.21.52.134 (be patient)
...
Finished 500 requests


Server Software:        lighttpd
Server Hostname:        72.21.52.134
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /hello.html
Document Length:        13 bytes

Concurrency Level:      9
Time taken for tests:   19.78523 seconds
Complete requests:      500
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      119500 bytes
HTML transferred:       6500 bytes
Requests per second:    26.21 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       343.413 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       38.157 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent
requests)
Transfer rate:          6.08 [Kbytes/sec] received



Here's the lighty config:

server.modules              = (
                               "mod_access",
                               "mod_accesslog" )
server.document-root       = "/usr/local/www/data"
server.port                = 80
server.username            = "www"
server.groupname           = "clients"
server.pid-file            = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid"
server.tag                 = "lighttpd"
accesslog.filename         = "/var/log/lighttpd.access.log"
server.errorlog            = "/var/log/lighttpd.error.log"
server.indexfiles          = ( "index.php", "index.html",
                              "index.htm", "default.htm" )
url.access-deny            = ( "~", ".inc" )

mimetype.assign             = (
 ".html"         =>      "text/html",
 ".htm"          =>      "text/html",
)

weigon_ on #lighttpd had me run ktrace, and here's the part he found relevant
22.577040 CALL  accept(0x4,0xbfbfea40,0xbfbfea3c)
22.577583 CALL  close(0x8)
75740 lighttpd 22.577632 CALL  poll(0x806ec00,0x2,0x3e8)
75740 lighttpd 22.614031 RET   poll 1

So it's .5ms to handle a request, but 40ms waiting for the next
request.  I'm not entirely sure what any of this means.

Thanks for any help,
Pat