Earlier quoted context omitted.
The average non-commercial site these days is based on an unoptimized Wordpress installation that loads 137 PHP files and does 18 DB reqests to render its main page. This 1996 gem is entirely static content. That's a few orders of magnitude less work for the server to do right there. And it runs on IIS 7, so the the hardware and software that does the actual work is most definitely NOT from 1996.
> And it runs on IIS 7, so the the hardware and software that does the actual work is most definitely NOT from 1996. And this is the big thing right here. We're running sites designed to be basically usable when served by 1996 hardware on systems orders of magnitude faster with almost two decades' worth of optimizations compared to what was acceptable in 1996. I don't know how much NTFS has changed since then, but fi…
I'd bet the only limiting factor of '96 hardware would be the NIC, all else being equal. Webserver software was a lot less complicated back then, so its memory footprint was far smaller.