This post is pretty technical; if you don't consider yourself a geek, you'll likely want to skip it.
Apache is the most popular web server in the world. That doesn't necessarily mean its the best for all tasks though.
NGINX ("Engine X") is another web server. NGINX has been gaining quite a bit of popularity recently as it seems to run more efficiently than Apache, enabling less powerful web servers to handle a larger number of requests. This higher efficiency has made NGINX very popular in the virtual private server (VPS) scene.
I have a few VPS I use for experimentation / pet projects, and recently decided to give NGINX a try. But why stop there with the experimentation? Why not install XCache & PHP-FPM as well?
NGINX
yum install nginx
(The config file will be installed to /etc/nginx/nginx.conf - check it out, much cleaner than httpd.conf imho)
PHP-FPM
../configure --with-libevent=/usr/lib --with-fpm --with-mcrypt --with-zlib -
-enable-mbstring --with-openssl --with-mysql --with-mysql-sock --with-gd --with-
jpeg-dir=/usr/lib --enable-gd-native-ttf --without-sqlite --disable-pdo --disabl
e-reflection --with-mysqli=/usr/bin/mysql_config --with-curl --prefix=/usr/local
/php --with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php.d
XCACHE
./configure --enable-xcache --with-php-config=/usr/local/php/bin/php-config
make
make install
cp xcache.ini /etc/php.d/xcache.ini
vi xcache.ini
zend_extension = /usr/local/php/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/xcache.so