So, profiled the Martini bench and discovered it was doing a LOT of file operations. I looked in the code and found that it does that in dev mode. The benchmark sets the mode to "production". D'oh! Ok, so I profiled it again and guess what? Martini is STILL doing a lot of file stuff. It's in net/http.Dir.Open and I believe it has to do with how the middleware is setup. You can see a TON of time spent in runtime.cgocall which I believe is it waiting for a syscall to come back. Don't have time to look into it further today but I'd imagine clearing that up could possibly double the performance.