Description: When it comes to handling lots of visitors, high-volume sites like Yahoo!, Netscape, and Microsoft have learned that the actual quality of service a Web server provides to end users typically depends on two parameters -- network-transfer speed and server-response time. Network-transfer speed is mainly a matter of your Internet-link bandwidth, while server-response time depends upon resources: fast CPU (especially for CGI programs), lots of RAM (especially for parallel-running HTTP daemon processes), and good I/O performance (especially for disk and network traffic).
