Apache Bench Questions RE Transfer Rate

Hi all,

I'm getting very confused how to read Apache Bench data.

Apache Benching my local machine gives me wildly different numbers between my dev linode and my production linode.

My dev server gets about 2x RPS benching from the same machine.

My production servers gets half that.

I see that my production machine gets half the transfer rate, so that would explain the 2x reduction in RPS.

Why is my production server getting half the transfer rate of my dev server?

13488Kb/s (benching from local production linode to itself)

28943Kb/s (benching from local dev linode to itself)

If I bench from one linode to another, I get different transfer rates and RPS nearly every time I run it. Is the only consistent thing to bench from your local server and call it a relative value from there? I can't even get consistent numbers benching from Production -> Dev, Dev -> Production.

If I bench from my desktop, I get wildly different data based on how fast I can download at the time.

So am I supposed to just take relative values benching from localhost to take the network out of the equation? Optimize a bit and see how much better I bench from localhost?

Thanks!