there are many lightweight polling webservers like nginx, lighttpd etc Question from a newbie: is there any disadvantage to polling? Allow me to digress a lit

there are many lightweight polling webservers like nginx, lighttpd etc Question from a newbie: is there any disadvantage to polling? Allow me to digress a little. When I look at the benchmark comparisons between Apache and the new, lightweight crowd that there is no way a modest static site could serve anything reasonable back in 1995. I realize that in 1995 there was way less traffic, but some humble sites did get thousands of visits per hour. It looks like this can very well choke an Apache server with 2010 hardware! I guess my question could be rephrased thus: Why didn't the Apache folks take this lightweight path fifteen years ago, when it mattered much more? Any comments will be welcome.