I am a complete beginner and am planning to setup a photo sharing site. This is the setup I am planning, basically for a start - - Cherokee (instead of Apache) for serving dynamic content (python-based application), and Nginx for serving static files.
Since, I am a beginner, what have I, to lose? So, can someone, from your experience, please tell me, what I'd lose by choosing Cherokee over Apache for serving dynamic content in PHP/Python/whatever?
Anything other than the fact that there's lot of documentation, many people who can help when there's an issue etc as Apache is well established and the most popular web server?
Again, my intention is not to spurt a flame war here. Just wanted to know if Cherokee would be better than Apache in terms of performance, reliability, and speed, when it matters (peak load times). Also, I heard it's a lot faster than Apache in serving dynamic content, is it true?
UPDATE: In another scenario, can someone kindly suggest a dynamic content web server for busy websites the size of Picasa, flickr, or YouTube? Building my website on top of that, I believe would ease the scaling of my photo & video sharing website. This is kinda subjective, but this is not the main question, although I would love to have some clarification for the same.
Cherokee has proven to be a good server, faster than Apache. I can't speak towards how it scales, but for the most part, it seems to be more responsive for small-medium sized sites at least. The major thing with Cherokee is that I don't think there's a reasonable equivalent to the .htaccess files that apache uses for per-container/per user settings. If this isn't a requirement, then jump right into Cherokee.
The other major thing you're missing out has nothing to do with the software directly, but rather the support and answers available to you for problems you may run into along the way. Apache is old, established, etc.... and as such, you can find a plethora of help, and ideas for how to solve various problems and so on. There's no way you'll find as much for Cherokee. So in short, your support resources are likely better for Apache