Actually, anyone who has been in this industry for more than a few years knows that Apache has always had event-based 'competition'.

When I was at Linuxcare, I had the static assets moved over to a different server with Boa, since the main Apache server had a massive mod_perl memory footprint. It speeded things up and freed up a lot of memory. And this was 10 years ago...

The Apache advantage has always been that it did (a lot) more than just spit out static files quickly. Perhaps nginx or something else will take its place, but it certainly won't be merely a question of event-based servers being faster with static files. We've known that for many years.

I use nginx because it consumes a fraction of the resources that Apache does (even when doing nothing but serve static files).

"Even" or "especially"? I'm very inexpert on this stuff, but I thought the folklore was that Apache is appropriate when you need its configurability or when most of the time spent servicing each request is spent doing real work rather than web-server overhead, and that you want things like nginx/lighttpd/... for cases when you're serving mostly static files and care about pushing them out as fast as possible. Am I way out of date?