The latter seems tricky. It's validation inside the application a bottleneck?
event doesn't support HTTPS, or rather, it stops being event-based when you turn on HTTPS. So Apache can never be performant unless you have an SSL terminating proxy.
Its only advantage is that the config script is slightly easier to test, but it's still way too hard _and_ it's incredibly verbose compared to nginx config.
Have you got any reference to this? I think I should have noticed, having run Apache with fairly bursty traffic.
The only reference in the documentation was a four year old one, which said it was problematic six years prior to that...
I find the Event MPM to be very stable under pressure and unless you have some really specific need it's the only sane way to run Apache. It should have been the default ages ago (in the limited sense Apache even has defaults).
The basis you pick your web server on shouldn't be whether it's "new" or "old". It is what your software runs on, what support contracts you have, and what functionality you need. But don't use it if you can't configure it. Preferrably your organization should have knowledge about every piece of software in production.
Long story short, I decided not to use any of the partial WebDAV implementations for Nginx and just use sshfs instead. It's so true that Apache is a swiss army knife, though.
Nginx seems to have a different model. It does support a number of features but from what I can see it focuses on composing functionality with HTTP rather than adding more plugins.
Nginx seems to do a great job at being a load balancer and cdn-lite, and it seems like that's what the market wants out of a web server.