I've gone down this rabbit hole recently, I was using apache because it come with a lot of nice to haves beside http handling, like authorization, session and cookie modules, but I wanted to see if c and cgi were viable for modern web development and the results were fantastic. Response times of 1ms while hitting an sqlite database every. I didn't go much further with the performance testing but it could easily handle more than most of the enterprise crap I build ever needs.
C and CGI are a great simple combo. When you get down to it 99% of web development is shuffling data from sql to html and vice versa. It's so stupidly simple that the main code doesn't even hit the rough edges of c, there are almost no allocations for isntance so no memory management to worry about, everything that could possible leak memory or cause security issues is in a handful of utility functions.
No MVC, no DTO's, no view models, no service layers, no templating, no client side javascript, just reading from and sql connection and printf'ing html to stdout. Without all the useless complications I ended up with far less code than the typical equivalent in a high level language with a framework. I'm now fairly convinced that most of the projects I've worked on would have been better off this way.