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.