personally, I like both analysis done every time....requests/second and average time/request and love seeing the max request time as well on top of that. it is easy to flip if you have 61 requests/second, you can then just flip it to 1000ms / 61 requests.
To answer your question, we have been doing a huge load test ourselves and find it ranges on various amazon hardware we use(best value was the 32 bit medium cpu when it came down to $$ / event / second) and our requests / seconds ranged from 29 requests / second / node up to 150 requests/second/node.
Giving better hardware of course gives better results but not the best ROI. Anyways, this post was great as I was looking for some parallels to see if my numbers where in the ballpark and shared mine as well in case someone else is looking. Mine is purely loaded as high as I can go.
NOTE: thanks to requests/second analysis(not ms/request) we found a major linux issue that we are trying to resolve where linux(we tested a server in C and java) freezes all the calls into socket libraries when under too much load which seems very odd. The full post can be found here actually.... http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=11202389
We are still trying to resolve that as it gives us a huge performance boost in that our test goes from 2 minutes 42 seconds to 1 minute 35 seconds when this is fixed so we see a 33% performancce improvement....not to mention, the worse the DoS attack is the longer these pauses are so that all cpus drop to zero and stop processing...in my opinion server processing should continue in the face of a DoS but for some reason, it freezes up every once in a while during the Dos sometimes up to 30 seconds!!!
ADDITION: We found out it was actually a jdk race condition bug....hard to isolate on big clusters but when we ran 1 server 1 data node but 10 of those, we could reproduce it every time then and just looked at the server/datanode it occurred on. Switching the jdk to an earlier release fixed the issue. We were on jdk1.6.0_26 I believe.