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> For 99% of use cases webserver speed is rarely an issue.

OK. But you might as well use a fast setup if there's no cost in complexity to do so.

Rule 1: there is always a complexity cost

We switched from Apache to lighttpd back in the day specifically for performance issues; the other option would have been to add a new server. This wasn't "Facebook scale": just a small company with 2 devs running a few sites with quite a lot of pageviews.

Since then computers (and presumably also Apache) have become faster and I don't really know how it compares today, but at least in the past it really did make a significant enough performance difference to care about.

Were you using mpm_prefork on apache, or one of the threaded process managers?

This was over 10 years ago... We tried a few things; I don't recall the details. I assume we tried this.

Getting Apache from distro repos is like using MS Word and Nginx like Notepad. Rarely you use all the features available on Apache but, mostly at the beginning, compiling Nginx to get features was the daily routine.