One of the best quotes evah:
Personally, before I did this test, I was certain that LightTPD would win the race. Obviously, large software which is perceived bloated not necessarily is.
mod_php, LightTPD, FastCGI – What’s Fastest
Put that on a Times Square ticker.
James Cape 
FastCGI + Apache + APC had failures, yes. Apache + mod_php + APC had no failures, and was only 8ms slower per-request.
Yeah… apache was 0.000014 seconds faster, but 4 requests failed… that isn’t exactly and improvement…
a better test would be a few hundred or thousand concurrent requests… 🙂