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In 1996 we set up a rack (department store surplus) of Cyrix 586 (running on 486 socket C motherboards) running at 75mhz with 16mb of RAM and could serve 100 concurrent users with CGI scripts and image maps doing web serving and VOIP with over 1 million requests a month on a single T1 line.

Good luck doing that on a load balanced rack of 96 core AMD servers today.

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Are you seriously arguing that a rack of modern servers can’t handle 100 concurrent users?

It would be harder than it needs to be with modern software 'engineering' practices.

...a RACK full of 96-core servers could give a whole core to each user and still have hundreds to spare.

Peak requests per second (and whether a SIP invite or CGI script being run) would be very useful to know.

SIP hasn't gotten much heavier, nor CGI scripts, and tiny distros like OpenWRT can do a lot with little iron.

Heard lots of rough ADSL era VoIP stories, hopefully you weren't struggling with that back then.

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