The first half of your post is basically a long-winded appeal to popularity. Yes, most people on the web use PHP and Apache. Most people on the web also need nothing more than a WordPress installation and their online needs are met. Does that mean WordPress is the best tool out there? You should stop confusing popularity with quality, because the two rarely overlap.

> C10K is not a problem and never was.

Somebody better tell the developers of nginx, Lighttpd, Tornado, node.js, Cherokee, Apache Deft, IIS, and Jetty! All those hours wasted developing solutions to a problem that doesn't exist.

> Which is why people continue to use Apache.

For someone who just decried a situation "infinitely more complex" a few line breaks ago, you sure did generalize the reason millions of servers use a certain piece of software. It couldn't be because Apache has an easier installation on most of the common distros or that cPanel/WHM, the most-used virtual hosting control panel, only supports Apache as its web server. It also couldn't be because of mod_php.

This all stems from your conflation of popularity with quality. PHP did not become popular because it was good. It became popular because it was easy to learn and run.

> Except that article was written by somebody who doesn't have much experience in PHP and most of those complaints don't apply to the current stable version. The rest are easily avoided with sane design.

Most of his criticisms were completely valid, so I'm not sure where you're getting the author doesn't have much experience in PHP. Which ones have been fixed in the current stable PHP? And which ones can be avoided "with sane design"?

> Which explains why Python is so unpopular.

Now I know you're spouting nonsense: https://github.com/languages/

Reading through your responses, I'm curious about how much experience you actually have in our industry. Most of what you claim is easily falsifiable.

The idea that C10K doesn't matter is definitively untrue. I've worked with numerous large systems (games, content) where Apache was the problem, and swapping it out was the solution to making maximal use of the hardware and the (gigE+) pipes.

Even outside of saturation, there are large-scale systems that benefit from being able to park an open socket and provide asynchronous notifications over that socket (in web terms, think websockets). If you're paying for a thread or process for every socket, this becomes prohibitively expensive very quickly.

It's also not an unusual use case outside of traditional web development, and now with websockets, this kind of architecture is likely to see considerably more use. This approach provides numerous advantages to legacy polling approaches, but does not work on traditional short-lived connection software architectures.

In addition to the above, your discussion of robustness really has no bearing on Apache's architectural suitability in production use-cases.

Auto-restart functionality exists for other architectures, and in addition to that, it's standard practice to deploy multiple servers with automatic failover behind a load balancer -- in addition to the server process itself, the OS can crash, disk drives can fail, power supplies can blow, etc.

Additionally, you shouldn't have production processes crashing regularly, and shouldn't be making significantly performance-impacting architectural choices on the basis of Apache's ability to restart a child process. Software crashes in production are a worst-case failure, akin to a drive failing, and should never be so common as to justify Apache's performance costs/constraints.