hardware
One of our best servers at work was inherited from a previous engagement for x64 testing: it's a dual Opteron 250 with 8 gigabytes of RAM. Even after a year of service, those are still decent specs. And it has a nice upgrade path, too: the Tyan Thunder
server
One of the key differences between the original dot-com bubble and the Web 2.0 bubble we're entering now is that our servers are a lot cheaper and a lot more powerful. Moore's Law in action isn't exactly news, but the new web is
hardware
The always entertaining Dan [http://www.dansdata.com/] linked to something I hadn't seen before-- an archived page of the Google server hardware circa 1999 [http://web.archive.org/web/19990209043945/google.stanford.edu/googlehardware.html] : [http://web.archive.org/web/19990209043945/google.stanford.edu/googlehardware.html] Here
c#
One of our production web servers keeps deadlocking the ASPNET_WP process, like so: aspnet_wp.exe (PID: 3588) was recycled because it was suspected to be in a deadlocked state. It did not send any responses for pending requests in the last 180 seconds. This is painful. It means