Can you explain how running any other httpd that runs PHP via FastCGI or CGI would be any better? The problem is that they're dynamic pages. The solution is to statically cache the page in question. Since WP has this block in the default .htaccess:
if you just SSH in to the server, cd over to the HTML root, wget the page in question and save the file as the name of the path, it'll statically cache it and instantly alleviate ~95% of the work needed to serve the page.
Dynamic pages are the culprit in /any/ dynamic CMS, and caching is the solution. You could use Varnish, or write/find a memcached plugin, or use redis or whatever other key/value store is trendy at the moment...it's all caching and it's the best way to make dynamic sites fast (besides Cloudflare, which is just "magical" black-box caching)
Edit: TL;DR using nginx or lighttpd or cherokee or webrick or whatever other httpd happens to be trendy this week won't help that much. Properly configuring a caching system will help an order of magnitude more.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
if you just SSH in to the server, cd over to the HTML root, wget the page in question and save the file as the name of the path, it'll statically cache it and instantly alleviate ~95% of the work needed to serve the page.
Dynamic pages are the culprit in /any/ dynamic CMS, and caching is the solution. You could use Varnish, or write/find a memcached plugin, or use redis or whatever other key/value store is trendy at the moment...it's all caching and it's the best way to make dynamic sites fast (besides Cloudflare, which is just "magical" black-box caching)
Edit: TL;DR using nginx or lighttpd or cherokee or webrick or whatever other httpd happens to be trendy this week won't help that much. Properly configuring a caching system will help an order of magnitude more.