Apache and Tux running together

Hi all,

I'm wondering if anyone has tried a scenario that I'm thinking of. At
my job we've got a web based product provided by Apache running PHP
that accesses MySQL. This web application is hosted by multiple servers
behind a load balancer because of the user load on the system. However,
we've still had times when the servers got over run and Apache maxes
out on the number of httpd processes (257) and falls behind to the
point of timing out. When this happens and I look at the servers with
top, they aren't particulary busy, but with 257 big httpd process (PHP
and MySQL totalling 15 Megs of ram), the server is bound up.

So here's my question; has anyone tried running the tux kernel based
web server alongside Apache with the goal of freeing Apache from
serving up static files and increasing it's capacity to handle dynamic
requests? I had one of the guys on our team try to set this up.
Essentially configuring tux so it would serve all static content and
pass on other requests (php pages) to Apache. Both processes are
running on the same server. We got this working, but didn't see much of
an improvement in the capacity of the server.

If anyone has tried this, or had any experience with this, I'd
appreciate knowing.

Thanks in advance,
Doug