With apache 1.3 being simpler I would imagine it has more scope for speed than apache 2.
Which is faster, would be interesting but testing has to be thought out well, depending on what you are hoping to prove. ab can be used for some comparison tests but wouldn't reflect performance for live traffic which would have to be replayed or cleverly produced for each server and any tests would be affected by many factors which you would need to control and monitor, without those monitors affecting the system. Even if apache 2.2 was twice as fast, you are going to need multiple connections and servers for high loads and redundancy at some point. So speed helps reduce costs but I'd much rather have two more secure apaches than one less secure one handling the same amount of traffic. After all, insurance for payment gateways is tied to security breaches (often client side), it would be nice if people using OpenBSD got a discount, rather than being less! likely to be penalised :-) It would be fairer if people using OpenBSD on their desktops could get lower interest loans too or if microsoft had to compensate the banks and the world for insecurity and crafty/stupid instability. OpenBSD does more when running each process for security reasons and so is arguably slower than Linux, but also does less by default and so is faster than most distros. It's still blisteringly fast, especially where it counts and if I had to choose one OS to use it would be OpenBSD.
