Breaking the LAMP loop, alternative web serving methods

Lately I decided to look elsewhere than the usual "linux apache mysql php". Reading on docs makes me draw something like apache or ngingx as a load balancer front-end, the same as the backend adding lighttpd for fast streaming ofdata. This leave me more confused than before:

My head started to wirl and I thought myself using a beast like apache to do load balancing was a bit like killing a fly with a nuke, so for I looked elsewhere for two solutions, reverse proxy or tcp-loadbalance? and then apt-cache search came to the rescue:

Pound

The config file is one placed in /etc/pound/pound.conf, is very simple and straight forward.

Pound Reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTPS front-end for Web servers

For the serving of static/dynamic content I de

Yet Another Web Server(in erlang)