yeah dude - php-fpm is the best way to go for fastcgi management (soon to be even better) and nginx i am discovering is hands down the best way to do any web proxying or web serving. it has a couple minor things i've realized are annoying (and surprised that it hasn't been fixed before) but otherwise i've been extremely happy with the switch.
hadar Cool! I'm part of the Google group now for php-fpm, so I'll see any announcements about newer versions, and look forward to checking them out. Thanks for letting me know!