performance on individual pages is very different than overall system throughput.

In fact I would expect the usual webserver approach makes individual pages slower to generate (greater latency between webserver and database). What I was saying, though, is that I'd expect the overall system to be able to generate more pages/second.

My two major areas of concern would be overall I/O throughput (HTML tends to be more data than query results) and CPU bottlenecks (Oracle loves to waste lots of CPU on spinlocks, generating very high loads).

However this is all theoretical. I've never seen two equivalent systems created and benchmarked against each other.

Cheers,
Ben