Apache's architecture is such that it's very bound to "files" and a strict request/response message pattern. That makes things like long polling, async sockets,

Apache's architecture is such that it's very bound to "files" and a strict request/response message pattern. That makes things like long polling, async sockets, and even streaming say ICY (check our mp3stream demo) really difficult. In Mongrel2 it's kind of like every thing's long poll or an async socket. That let's you do a ton of very cool things you can't do easily in Apache or other web servers. Sure you could hack them in, but it's a nightmare.