 <p>OWIN is merely an abstraction for running web applications on different web servers. Katana is one implementation. The most important performance numbers for requests/second are those for web servers, not OWIN or Katana.</p> <p>OWIN performance comparisons would only make sense if you wanted to know how much overhead a framework added to your web app and could be tested using the <a href="http://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Owin.Testing" rel="nofollow">Microsoft.Owin.Testing</a> <code>TestServer</code> in isolation of network latency. Here, you could compare differences in <a href="http://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Owin" rel="nofollow">Katana</a>, <a href="http://www.nuget.org/packages/Dyfrig" rel="nofollow">Dyfrig</a>, <a href="https://www.nuget.org/packages/Nancy.Owin/" rel="nofollow">NancyFx</a>, <a href="http://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Owin" rel="nofollow">Web API</a>, and others.</p>