Anecdotes are not data, but if you're in the market for an anecdote anyway... A thousand times no. Nginx+php-fastcgi is screamingly fast by comparison, while

Anecdotes are not data, but if you're in the market for an anecdote anyway... A thousand times no. Nginx+php-fastcgi is screamingly fast by comparison, while allowing me to free up about 70% of the memory previously in use, and get huge gains from loading the PHP code into RAM with APC. I look after one managed server which chucks out tens of millions of requests per day despite only having half a gig of RAM in it. Before, running apache2, it had a load average of about 6.0. Now? 0.2.