Sounds like it's time for an anecdote! In 2008, my web site saw some decent traffic, and I was stuck in a spiral of buying more and more expensive servers to k

Sounds like it's time for an anecdote! In 2008, my web site saw some decent traffic, and I was stuck in a spiral of buying more and more expensive servers to keep up with the demand. Some of the media files were large, and slow downloads would tie up a thread, and corresponding chunk of memory. I spent a long time working through the documentation that was available at the time, and I couldn't get anything to work stably with Django. Then I found a guide for lighttpd, and was floored when the resources used by my web server dropped to single digits. Much later, I'd learn that even saturating a gigabit pipe with just html/css/image traffic ran fine. Nginx has since replaced lighttpd, since the latter doesn't seem to be well maintained these days. As I understand it, Apache now is capable of high performance, but once bitten twice shy. The whole thing just seemed to be a big, bloated mess to me. Like you can do everything imaginable, except what you actually want to do. I couldn't imagine a feature that would exist to convince me to move back. I expect quite a few web developers are in the same boat. Your criticism of the config file is nonsensical. I'd use nginx with Apache style configuration over the inverse in a heart beat - though I disagree it would be an improvement.