Web Server Performance

References

1. Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters
2. Varnish settings for performance
3. Tuning Apache and PHP for Speed on Unix
4. Official Apache Performance Tuning documentation
5. Scaling PHP applications with Varnish

LAMP (PHP)

Web servers running PHP can benefit greatly by using a caching with APC and Varnish.

Static vs. Dynamic

Dynamic sites are those which pages are generated on-the-fly using Python, Perl, Php, Ruby or NodeJS (there are more but these are the main languages).

They are typically backed by a SQL or NoSQL database on the back-end.

Because of the compute cycles needed, dynamic sites need more horsepower and are generally more brittle to load spikes.

For this reason you may consider a "static site" generated with the likes of Kiln, Hugo or Quartz