I've been refactoring some code running on a simple LAMP box on my network. I noticed that there really isn't any particular reason why we're using Apache aside from being able to say it's a LAMP setup.
I've heard of some other options (lighttpd, nginx, etc.) and was wondering what benefit using these would provide over using Apache. I'm running PHP 5.2 through FastCGI on Apache 2 as of right now. Would another platform provide better performance? Would setup or maintenance be more or less of an issue? Would reliability be affected?
I'm asking this as a purely hypothetical question; I don't really intend to change the platform of the server(s), I'm just curious about why one might choose one of the other apps over Apache.
Thanks in advance