In my experience, just about any webserver is faster than Apache. Not to mention easier to configure, maintain, understand.
The
de-facto standard often seems to suck: bind, sendmail, GCC, GNU binutils, screen, etc, etc.
It seems that projects have a sort of "gravity" which attract patches, and one a project grows in size the gravity grows with it, attracting patches both good and bad. At some point so many bad patched have accumulated (& have been committed) it will completely nullify the good patches.
I don't know if this is correct, these are just the results of my limited observations
