I'd like to compare the performance of different languages and/or different frameworks within the same language. This is aimed at server-side languages used for web development. I know an apples to apples comparison is not possible, but I'd like it to be as unbiased as possible. Here are some ideas :

Simple "Hello World" page
Object initialization
Function/method calls


Method bodies will range from empty to large

File access (read and write)
Database access

They can either be measured by Requests per second or I can use a for loop and loop many times. Some of these benchmarks should measure the overhead the language has (ie: empty function call) rather than how fast they perform a certain task. I'll take some precautions:

They'll run on the same machine, on fresh installations with as few processes on the background as possible.
I'll try and set up the server as officially recommended; I will not attempt any optimizations.

How can I improve on this?
You will spend a lot of time and come to realization that it was all wasted.
After you complete your tests you will learn that loops of 1000000 empty iterations are far from the real life and come to apache benchmark.
Then you come no know of opcode cachers which will ruin all your previous results.
Then you will learn that single DB query will take 1000 times longer time than API call, so, your comparisons of database access methods are really waste.
Then you will learn of memcache which will allow you just jump over some terrible bottlenecks you've discovered already, etc etc etc
How can I benchmark different languages / frameworks?