The page you're looking at was served by a tiny 256MB VPS slice (that can obviously grow with the addition of some money) that also performs a number of other tasks some of which are quite important. One of these important tasks is to run a Django download, authentication, billing, licensing, media serving (kinda) and other-important-stuff server whose performance was beginning to bother me. The root of these performance issues appeared to stem from not really having enough Apache processes around and while I might like to use the worker mpm module to get static file performance basically the same as trendy webserver du jour I can't because while Django is threadsafe (and the wsgi gateway positively embraces them) the situation with php5 is cloudy at best and, in fact, Debian enforces a "no multi-threading php" rule by yanking libapache-mod-php5 whenever you try to install apache2-mpm-worker. Bad nerd, no biscuit.

Hence the murky world of fastcgi awaits. Thankfully I found this somewhat tasty how-to for running php5 under fcgi on Debian including suexec'ing the user that the php5 process is run under and with some more-or-less following of the instructions (notably limiting myself to just one php process - it's not like it's actually all that important after all) we now have it whizzing along nicely. In the tradition of all amateur benchmarks I shall declare the resulting application to be "snappy" and get back to the serious business of what I was supposed to be doing.

But in all seriousness, Apache2's worker MPM is a thing of beauty if you can make use of it. And there is absolutely no need for a separate "special" webserver for serving static files - it's all bullshit.