Being stuck in a MS stack architecture/development position for the last year and a half has prevented me from staying on top of the world of open source stack based web servers recent evolution more than I would have liked to. However I am now building an open source stack based application/system architecture and sadly I do not have the time to give each of the above mentioned web servers a thorough test of my own to decide. So I figured I'd get input from the best development community site and more specifically the people who make it so.

This is a site that is a resource for information regarding a specific domain and target audience with features to help users not only find the information but to also interact with one another in various ways for various reasons.

I chose the open source stack for the wealth of resources it has along with much better offers than the MS stack (i.e. WordPress vs BlogEngine.NET). I feel Java is more in the middle of these stacks in this regard although I am not ruling out the possibility of using it in certain areas unrelated to the actual web app itself such as background processes.

I have already come to the conclusion of using PHP (using CodeIgniter framework & APC), MySQL (InnoDB) and Memcached on CentOS. I am definitely serving static content on Nginx. However the 3 servers mentioned have no consensus on which is best for dynamic content in regards to performance. It seems LightTPD still has the leak issue which rules it out if it does, Nginx seems it is still not mature enough for this aspect and of course Apache tries to be everything for everybody.

I am still going to compile the one chosen with as many performance tweaks as possible such as static linking and the likes. I believe I can get Apache to match the other 2 in regards to serving dynamic content through this process and not having it serve anything static. However during my research it seems the others are still worth considering.

So with all things considered I would love to hear what everyone here has to say on the matter. Thanks!