How else do you compare “web frameworks” except foe comparing their overhead?

No everyone wants to write a database application. There are absolutely other types of applications in the world. Applications can be CPU and/or memory bound.

I see what you’re getting at, but if you add a database call the I/O blocking time will completely eclipse CPU time. It would not be a useful comparison, similar to if you added a time.Sleep to each event handler.

The reviews by some other people here lead me to believe that it works fairly well both when there is something to process and when it's just chattiness.

If you mean Amdahl's Law (and maybe Little), messaging is generally considered part of the unavoidable. However TCP and this library both seem to be aware that while you cannot eliminate messaging overhead, you can amortize it over dozens and dozens of messages at a time and that reduces that bit of serialized cost by more than an order of magnitude.

> But that is not representative of a real app

Many, many real apps process millions of events per second. You may not have worked on any of them but that does not mean they don't exist.