That's great, but it's got nothing to do with Apache. If you choose a shitty language, and PHP is shitty no matter how popular it gets, you're limited in choices elsewhere. There's clearly a market for Nginx, low memory virtual servers running PHP. Remove PHP and use a better language and Apache scale just fine even in low memory conditions because without PHP, you don't have to use the old fashioned process model. Apache can work with PHP-FPM just like Nginx using the new evented worker mpm, but as PHP devs clearly find Apache confusing there's no reason to bother.