Wow, Michael Abrash's graphics programming black book is available here

http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/reference/programming/140/283/graphics-programming-black-book-r1698

Couple of quick tips -

To concat multiple pdfs -
gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite-sOutputFile=output.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf [...]


I got it from - 
http://doeidoei.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/easy-way-to-concatenate-pdf-files-in-ubuntu-linux/

Second ... httperf complaining about unavailable file handles - check out
http://gom-jabbar.org/articles/2009/02/04/httperf-and-file-descriptors
and http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~brecht/servers/openfiles.html

Even better is http://www.bolet.org/jgz/index-en.html - much more modular hence easier to understand

I found a pure ruby implementation of zlib - https://github.com/djberg96/pr-zlib -  god bless the authors

I'm gonna try a Haskell port :)

lmbench

looks like we need to get into the results dir and do a make summary to get human readable results.