mast0rx

You should use nginx or litespeed (VERY GOOD website, but it costs money) or lighttpd as Webservers. This 3 webservers use much lower ressources, so you have more power. Also the configuration of lighttpd is very easy, there is no mpm configuration like at apache. http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/12249/chris-lea-on-nginx-and-wordpress/

Sure, i am using this. Nginx (frontend) for statics, apache (backend) with suphp and eaccelerator. You can do this with every PHP application. You will have best performance with litespeed webserver (but it cost money, 15 days trial is free) or nginx alone. Litespeed also is working with suphp etc. and can handle .htaccess.