> both in ease of administration and more importantly, in performance (why is Apache still spawning processes for every request that comes in..
Apache has had thread model (no need to fork new processes) and EVEN nginx like event model, with fewer/threads than connections for quite a while. Update your info. We run latest IIS and apache on production servers and IIS seems to do pretty well but saying the things you say about apache isn't fair and false in some cases.
In fact, we run instances of apache with event model (max 75 threads, max 4096 connections, keep alive 5 seconds) as a caching reverse proxy and WAF (mod_security) in front of IIS application servers and others. Centralized WAF configuration for all applications and caching so all static content requests rarely hit the application servers.
App server behind the caching reverse-proxy get 2 to 15 work threads, keepalive rarely on, the config is fine tuned with the help of benchmarks and yes, some backend apps are faster with only 2 workers and often degrade with more than 15.
This is a typical performance setup.