In this new post from Dries Buytaert, he takes a look at some of the common web server configurations for running Drupal on a pre-populated site with lots of users/nodes/path aliases/comments/etc.

After a little bit of configuration, he did some testing (with ab2) on the following benchmarks:

• Drupal's built-in caching versus APC
• a PHP4 installation versus a PHP5 install
• Using a reverse proxy
• mod_php versus FastCGI
• Apache versus Lighttpd

In his conclusions, he notes that the slowest configuration for the install was the combination of PHP5 running as a module on Apache 2 without APC. The fastest - FastCGI on Lighttpd running the PHP4 version.