The thing to note is that waitress is not built for the highest speed, or the fastest, or anything along those lines.
Its primary use case is that it is pure python, doesn't rely on any specific libraries or compilers to run/build, and is a threaded WSGI implementation so it uses Python threads to run a WSGI app.
It works well for what it needs to do, and hopefully it is fairly robust. I've personally ran waitress directly facing the internet, but will readily admit that in most cases running it behind a load balancer is a good idea, especially since it doesn't support SSL out of the box (yet, I should say, it's on my roadmap).
It won't win any speed contests and it won't win performance contests, but it holds its own.
IDK but the mod_wsgi, although there seems to be a ton of documentation... It's way harder to install than a virtual environment, python and django. I love doing backend stuff in python and jinja but I fucking hate setting up wsgi on apache. It really makes me love php again.
Is there any reason why do you need mod_wsgi and apache? gunicorn behind nginx is an ideal setup for me (nginx handles static files and reverse proxying while gunicorn handles the python backend). I wrote a Dockerfile that combine all of those in a single package and I've been using it with very little tweaks for many of my smaller projects over the years and it makes deployment very easy.
