Using the distro's build of Apache is actually preferred for production servers. The distro build commonly has useful patches and will receive very fast securit

Using the distro's build of Apache is actually preferred for production servers. The distro build commonly has useful patches and will receive very fast security updates, not to mention being tested much more than a one-off build. You just wouldn't use a stock configuration, for a multitude of reasons. The only reason you might compile it yourself for a performance boost is to strip out all the features, but then you have to ask yourself if you even need Apache. We used different mpms for different purposes even 10 years ago. A cluster of boxes could still serve over a hundred thousand mod_perl responses per second, at which point with a decent-sized set of perl apps your bottlenecks are application CPU and memory, not connection processing. Prefork is simply the most compatible mpm for every module that exists, so of course you'd ship that as the default for a distro. Server software being "fast out of the box" is like saying a phone's battery comes "fully charged out of the box". It's convenient, but I can also just take an hour and get it there myself.