For static content the massive leap was from multithreaded/fork()ing servers to event-based servers (like nginx) powered by epoll (and similar). Event based ser

For static content the massive leap was from multithreaded/fork()ing servers to event-based servers (like nginx) powered by epoll (and similar). Event based servers let you handle thousands of slow clients extremely easily. That's basically all you need to get the kind of performance 99.9% of people will ever need for static content. Nginx more than does this job. For dynamic content multi-process servers are still just fine because your code/DB requests are going to block for long periods, which is far easier than writing non-blocking code. Putting an event-based server in front of a multi-process server for dynamic stuff gets you the best of both worlds. Something like G-WAN might have a niche for the few people that need to write some piece of their service in C for performance reasons. But, you can pretty easily do that as an nginx module as well, and it's simply not necessary except in very rare cases. It seems neat, but I don't think it's of much use to most people.