New on the SitePoint PHP blog there's a tutorial combining WordPress and PHP-FPM/nginx to give you a high-performance version of your site.
In this tutorial, I'll show how to build a server capable of withstanding a front-page Digg placement, step by step. This will mean your business stays online when it’s most important—when everyone is looking. We'll go through the process of building a super-fast, bulletproof custom web server for WordPress. The technology stack we'll use is Ubuntu, nginx, PHP-FPM, and MySQL. In a future article we'll look at adding memcached to the mix to take performance even further.
He walks you through the full install of each piece of software (on a linux-based system) even helping you compile PHP 5.3. There's some examples of configurations and a few shell commands you'll need to get things linked together and working, but the overall process is pretty quick and painless. Even if you already have a WordPress site, it's not too hard to follow along and drop it right in.