Not sure which year (decade? :P) you're talking about but in the beginning (before 2010, maybe 2007-08?) Jan was still kinda involved in the German PHP scene an

Not sure which year (decade? :P) you're talking about but in the beginning (before 2010, maybe 2007-08?) Jan was still kinda involved in the German PHP scene and I can't imagine that to be true, I only remember good interactions and we were one of the heaviest users of lighttpd back then. But the docs were never that great, and it seemed to be a one man show, later with a very small team, that's when I think it stalled and only picked up pace years later. But there indeed came a time (maybe 2010ish?) where nginx took the lead with gread strides and most people (even the die-hard fans) mostly moved to nginx, that's about when it was clear that it would probably win and stay for the forseeable future. Back in those circles at least (see some other comments for the PHP FPM story) Apache was only kept for setups with lots of different other dependencies, like mod_svn or webdav, if you "only" needed a webserver to front PHP it was nginx. I also remember many people holding out on adopting Apache 2.2 for a looong time.