"It's time for web servers to handle ten thousand clients simultaneously, don't you think? After all, the web is a big place now. And computers are big, too. You can buy a 1000MHz machine with 2 gigabytes of RAM and an 1000Mbit/sec Ethernet card for $1500 or so. Let's see - at 20000 clients, that's 500KHz, 100Kbytes, and 50Kbits/sec per client. It shouldn't take any more horsepower than that to take four kilobytes from the disk and send them to the network once a second for each of twenty thousand clients." DNM mentioned this site to me at Defcon. Its a deep technical look at doing scalable network IO. The ideas apply in lots of different contexts. The C10K problem | 
