FWIW: I (@rondy) am not the creator of the content shared here, which is an excerpt from Edmond Lau's book. I simply copied and pasted it from another location and saved it as a personal note, before it gained popularity on news.ycombinator.com. Unfortunately, I cannot recall the exact origin of the original source, nor was I able to find the author's name, so I am can't provide the appropriate credits.
For this configuration you can use web server you like, i decided, because i work mostly with it to use nginx.
Generally, properly configured nginx can handle up to 400K to 500K requests per second (clustered), most what i saw is 50K to 80K (non-clustered) requests per second and 30% CPU load, course, this was 2 x Intel Xeon with HyperThreading enabled, but it can work without problem on slower machines.
You must understand that this config is used in testing environment and not in production so you will need to find a way to implement most of those features best possible for your servers.