Plentyoffish.com - One server

I think IIS sucks in almost every way, but no one can say it's slow or inefficient. What he's proving is how far you can scale up vertically these days. It's worth noting that his 8-core machine is equivalent in power to quite a few dual PIII 1.3Ghz machines, which was the standard configuration not too long ago.

Scribd is a good Linux example, where they're doing quite a bit of traffic with a single 4-core web server. Although with Rails/Mongrel they'll never be anywhere near as efficient.

Markus isn't very forthcoming in mentioning that he has some monster SQL Server machines with a 60 drive 15k RPM SAN. That's doing most of the heavy lifting on his site, and is some expensive gear. His web application is an especially thin front-end to his database.

He also has 3 web servers handling his IM stuff.

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/12/07/scaling-sql-server-2005-national-tv-usa-canada/ http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/12/01/8-way-dual-core-opterons-with-128gbram/