I'm getting under 5000 requests per second hitting just the nginx welcome page on a default configuration.

Any tips to improve this please?

setup is:
==
macbook pro retina 10.8.3
RoverMR:webserver rover$ nginx -v
nginx version: nginx/1.4.3

== Running ab test ==

RoverMR:webserver rover$ ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://127.0.0.1/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking 127.0.0.1 (be patient)
Completed 100 requests
Completed 200 requests
Completed 300 requests
Completed 400 requests
Completed 500 requests
Completed 600 requests
Completed 700 requests
Completed 800 requests
Completed 900 requests
Completed 1000 requests
Finished 1000 requests


Server Software: nginx/1.4.3
Server Hostname: 127.0.0.1
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /
Document Length: 612 bytes

Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 0.268 seconds
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 844000 bytes
HTML transferred: 612000 bytes
Requests per second: 3729.66 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 26.812 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.268 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 3074.06 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 1 12 3.1 13 17
Processing: 1 13 2.5 14 18
Waiting: 1 13 2.6 14 18
Total: 17 25 3.5 26 30

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 26
66% 27
75% 28
80% 28
90% 29
95% 29
98% 30
99% 30
100% 30 (longest request)
RoverMR:webserver rover$