One of my forum that I managed previously used Apache as a web server. From my observation Apache with PHP suck a lot of memory resources but that doesn't hang up the server. So google around and I found others using Apache as a proxy using reverse proxy. While Nginx serve as front end web server. The result is good! Nginx still using minimum memory usage! impressive :) But that's does not stop me from searching other solution that best for the forum, and I found solution for Nginx with PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager). Before that I've tried with spawn-fcgi but the process had died repeatedly. Not satisfied with that I've tried PHP-FPM ! Now stick with Nginx + PHP-FPM very satisfied! :)
Don't look your past, but look your future