As I said in a previous post, I am currently setting up my new server that will eventually host this site (as well as others).  I'm to the point presently that I am done with the major installs, and am working on fine tuning the setup.  So last night I downloaded WebLoad to help me find my servers weak points.  While I was doing that, the idea came to start testing apache vs. lighttpd.  Then I started testing more and more.  So here's the plan.  I'm going to start benchmarking the differences between Apache and Lighttpd, Joomla and my caching component, and finally (later on), I'm planning on timing every step in Joomla (to find what truely slows Joomla down).  The initial results for Apache and Lighttpd are quite interesting.  I didn't expect the results (for static html files) to be so dramatic!  Stay tuned for more!