But he is using the APC cache, which is part of PHP, so I'm not sure he could pull that off? PHP-FPM is the fastest way he could be using that interpreter anyhow, as it maintains a persistent bank of PHP instances in-memory, with nginx acting as a proxy to it via a Unix socket.

You wouldn't need APC if you weren't running PHP...

Yes, obviously I meant just serving static pages. You don't need to run every page through PHP in order to have comments, dude. (I didn't mean completely remove PHP, just not make everything run through it)

You are right, it would need less hardware for the same work. Two days ago I wrote this:

http://garron.me/linux/perfect-blogging-platform.html

But the way his comments work, they way he has implemented the infinite scroll it's great and I'm no expert, but I think that is not possible with static pages.

What would you replace PHP with? Are you suggesting static files ?