Questions[cherokee](server)

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.

Any of these web server software i.e., Apache, Nginx and Cherokee is suitable for my website at the moment. And I am learning sysadmin to be able to manage my server (and not for a job).

For a beginner that I am, any web server is equally new. So, please take a look at my requirements and kindly suggest a web server software to start with (and sit on... like forever):

• Scalability
• low resource footprint
• support for PHP, MySQL, APC, Memcached, Meteor - - all for a wordpress website
• useful now and in the long-term as my website's traffic increases
• load tolerant
• everything else...

As you can see, I am still in the beginner's phase. So, please don't come saying this is a controversial question. It definitely abides by SF's rules (or hopefully so, I just read them).

We have been running nginx -> uWSGI, and now we are evaluating putting Varnish as a caching layer between nginx and uWSGI (similar to http://www.heroku.com/how/architecture).

But, nginx only supports HTTP 1.0 on the back so it will have to create new connections with Varnish for each request.

Many recommend running nginx in front of Varnish, but wouldn't it make much more sense to use something like Cherokee so that you eliminate the HTTP connection overhead since it supports HTTP 1.1 on the back?

I'm optimizing our system for some faster static content delivery, and was wondering if anyone has any proper experience with the fastest web servers out there for such a purpose.

From the three main candidates I've considered, Nginx, Cherokee and Lighttpd, each seems to have its own problems - but the reports I've read online are somewhat biased and lean towards whichever server the user is currently using.

Any ideas on where to see a proper benchmark for this specific purpose, or at least a non-biased list of pros and cons? Any personal experiences and pitfalls I should be vary of?

Thanks

Edit: Serverfault.com gave the answer as nginx. I'd still like to hear some developer thoughts from this end of the universe.

I'm pretty new to cherokee, it's great and pretty straight forward except URL Rewrites. Is there a straight forward guide to it? Let me know.

Also how would I port this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

Thanks