strange remark about your collection?

I disagree. There are a whole lot of sysadmins who do not really understand such things; I'm sure lots of them would go "oh, I want a webserver, let's look up some recommended specs for webservers" and find a spec list by someone who's doing all sorts of server-side computation (which, to be fair, is what a lot of people think of "a webserver" as doing). Or they ask a friend who doesn't know the load in question and answers hurriedly. Or, with slightly more competence, they find a wide spectrum of answers and figure they don't know what's actually needed and err on the side of extra power. Huh? 1K hits a day is less than one a minute. Unless the files it's serving are truly ginormous, network bandwidth is not an issue; I'd expect a 486-based system to be just fine. (Of course, that "less than one a minute" is average; if traffic isn't approximately flat, it could actually need to serve four or five pages a minute during peak periods. I still have trouble seeing a 486 as insufficient.) The major reason _I_ see for using something beefier is ease of obtaining it. Octo-core Xeons with multiple gigs of RAM are trivial to order. 486s aren't, especially if you want a 1U or 2U rackmount machine 'cause that's what fits in your co-lo space. Latency, mayyyybe, if there's an expectation that the whole page be served with sub-second delay or some such silliness. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B