NT fans will be bothered by this, but as a long-time Unix Apache user, I find it convenient to have one format for both platforms. I'm sure that determined NT hackers could get the 2.0 package to build on NT, but it's not worth the pain for this Linux fan. On the Unix side, you can choose among several. For my tests, I ran the Apache servers on a Red Hat 7.0 Linux server and ran ab, the Apache benchmark program, on a separate Linux system connected over Ethernet. Given time, a dedicated user might be able to locate performance differences, but my results were inconclusive.
Many factors come into play and require tuning.
These range from Apache settings to disk layouts. If you're an Apache user, you'll hit limits in the default configuration before you reach your hardware limits unless you're running on a very underpowered server. When testing, experiment with increasing the Max limits in the configuration file. Because I work for an ISP, I'm interested in the perchild module. This is an extension of the suExec feature added to Apache 1.2.