> Why wouldn't you be able to virtually always do a better job of scheduling events (when you control all the code competing for resources) than a generic OS sc

> Why wouldn't you be able to virtually always do a better job of scheduling events (when you control all the code competing for resources) than a generic OS scheduler? Simply put, I would say that "you" (where "you" is an average webapp developer) probably don't understand scheduling, event-driven programming, or memory management as well as the average kernel developer. I of course don't mean this to extend to anyone in this thread. Imagine, though, giving your average PHP or ASP developer, who may struggle to implement a basic sort algorithm, the problem of implementing cooperative multitasking in a scalable way. > Do you know of any examples of ultra highly scalable fork()ing servers? Under real-world workloads, I still consider Apache to be "highly scalable." In my experience, given 1:1 investment in hardware for front-end and database servers, the RDBMS craps out long before the webapp, so being able to accept another 5000 incoming connections is only going to hurt you.