At the end of the day, Apache still is inferior in terms of performance under a high load situation. Primarily because of the fact that it forks a new process to handle a new request that is not already handled by an otherwise child that's free. Compare that to the multi-threaded processes on nginx/lighty/cherokee.

I've, myself, had an exponential performance gain using Cherokee instead of Apache. Where Apache would stall for me after I had like 100,000 images hosted (and about a few thousand requests per minute), Cherokee's still going strong at over 600,000 images and there's still room for more.
Lifetalk Reviewed by Lifetalk on . Apache vs nginx vs lighttpd (And Cherokee!) This thread was inspired by Lifetalk in the CB, sorry but I didn't set up Cherokee as I couldn't be bothered reading up as to how. But I'll include it next time! If you want to run some tests on your own machine that'd be cool for comparison (especially with hardware and stuff). Server specs: CPU: Xeon X3430 @ 2.40GHz RAM: 8GB HDD: 2x 1000GB in SW RAID 1. BW: 100Mbps (Not that it matters...). Server is CentOS 64bit, completely fresh format and the latest available kernel. Nothing has Rating: 5