I guess I’ve become somewhat of a performance nut. Truthfully a lot of the time is spent doing things for nominal improvements: changing MySQL’s tmp directory to be in RAM has had no noticeable impact on performance, for example. Defragging log files doesn’t speed much up either.
I was reading a bit about LiteSpeed, though. It’s got a web GUI to control it, and is supposedly much faster than Apache. I’ve got it installed, but I’m having some permission issues right now. (The problem is that changing them will break Apache, so I’m going to have to try it with some insignificant pages first.) It’ll automatically build APC or eAccelerator in. It apparently has some improved security features, too, which is spiffy. And it’s compatible with Apache, so I don’t have to start from scratch.
The base version is free, too. (But not GPL.) The “Enterprise” edition is $349/year or $499 outright purchase. To me, it’s not worth it. But if I were a hosting company with many clients, I might be viewing it differently, especially if the performance is as good as they say.
It looks like it may be marginally slower than LiteSpeed (depending on what you’re doing), but Lighttpd is still _very_ quick — and open-source. And it seems like they’ve recently revised the ebuild on Gentoo to make setting up PHP under FastCGI worlds easier (read: completely automatic). It’s not a drop-in Apache replacement, but it does have most of the same features albeit with different syntax.