FastCGI performance on lighttpd - to morph into - server performance in Drupalspace :)

Hi Folks,

I'm in the process of deploying a drupal site on dedicated hardware.

The server will be a dual core Zeon 3060 2.4Ghz with 2GB of RAM, and I'm tinkering the idea of either RAID1 or RAID10 (1+0)... disks are SATA at the moment, but SCSI is a possibility as well. (cost is a factor though I'm leaning on SCSI since simultaneous reads/writes are possible, under IDE this wasn't the case, but I'm not sure at the moment whether SATA has this capability, also the SCSI controller offloads disk I/O functions from the CPU(s)).

From the software perspective:
CentOS 5 64bit
Lighttpd 1.4.19
PHP 5.2.6
xCache 1.2.2
MySQL 5.0.45

I saw in the Drupal.org upgrade post presentation (http://drupal.org/node/191293) that there were issues with FastCGI. I understand this was run under Apache, has this ever been experienced with lighttpd?

Also, this might be a good opportunity (if it hasn't been discussed already that is) to get some input from the 'Vast Drupal Conspiracy' out there as to what hardware combos are currently implemented, and what are the server stats/simultaneous users are in the mix. Of course their is a 'Your Mileage May Vary' caveat to all this, but it seems to me that with the plethora of deployments, a good baseline can be achieved from the accumulated body of knowledge that resides here correlating it here in a series of posts might help others looking to deploy get an idea of what their needs are, etc.

Thoughts? :)
Regards,
Steve