Sure, you could do plenty with old 486's. But not hosting thousands of weblogs generating dynamic content. Not without load shooting up to 100, anyway. For a pa

Sure, you could do plenty with old 486's. But not hosting thousands of weblogs generating dynamic content. Not without load shooting up to 100, anyway. For a paltry few visitors, not so bad, but the more users and higher the traffic the worse it'd get. I should add that I completely forgot (has it been that long?) about the hacks we'd use to speed up dynamic content. Since there were no competent threading models for PHP and Perl at the time, we would use either FastCGI, or mod_php or mod_perl. The former would allow you to build app servers to handle multiple requests without terminating, to speed up initialization and share/cache memory. The latter would embed a PHP or Perl interpreter in the Apache process, eliminating lots of overhead, enabling better communication, and of course allowing you to prefork multiple Apache processes and execute scripts as soon as a request came in, and optionally stay resident in memory. But that's just execution speed; if you're reading from flat-files and spitting them out one by one, that's still a very i/o-bound operation and eats up more CPU than necessary. And ultimately, very few web hosts allowed using mod_perl or mod_php, and no weblog maintainer ever wrote FastCGI (nor were the servers configured for it). So everything was forked at run-time, leading to very slow page loads for any CGI script - unless you ran your own server, of course. It wasn't until later that LAMP development became more common and people started putting the kitchen sink into MySQL and PHP.