I have read the pros and cons of most of the popular web servers and have come to a conclusion that Apache would (probably) be the best web server for serving dynamic content - - no wonder YouTube, Flickr and Facbook, among many others, use it.

I do not know if that C10K problem applies to Apache even when serving dynamic content only, but I think any web server used to serve dynamic content needs some good tweaking for optimized performance, and the fact that nothing beats Apache when it comes to documentation, resources and support on the web, I think should will go with Apache for dynamic content.

That apart, the confusion begins when it comes to choosing web servers for static content (including streaming videos). I see that Nginx, Cherokee and Lighttpd are among the best (I am not considering non-open source or non-linux stuff here). So, which too choose?

1. I know one cannot go wrong with any of the three (Nginx, Cherokee, Lighttpd).
2. Lighttpd's development has evidently gotten slower than it was a good time ago.
3. The documentation is pretty good for all the three, and hopefully, so are the resources (knowledge of these among the users of Stackoverflow/Serverfault sites, the web etc).

Precisely, and noting point [2] and [3], if I am not wrong, I should either go with Nginx or Cherokee. I would love to see someone clarify these...

• is Cherokee just as fast (mb/s), performant (connections/s), and reliable (think downtime/restarting server) as Nginx for serving static content and load balancing, for small, medium to large (and really large) websites and applications? (Think, the size of YouTube, Apache or Facebook.)

• if the answer for the Q above is a big "hell, yes!" then, I should probably prefer Cherokee, right? Because, since I am a beginner, it would a lot easier to setup Cherokee as it has a graphical admin user interface + really good documentation. Yes?

I could be wrong, I could be right. I put down what I know so that you can offer most relevant advise. Pardon if anything I've said is offensive.