In 1999(!) the earliest version of the C10k paper I tracked down had this to say:<p>And computers are big, too. You can buy a 500MHz machine with 1 gigabyte of RAM and six 100Mbit&#x2F;sec Ethernet card for $3000 or so. Let&#x27;s see - at 10000 clients, that&#x27;s 50KHz, 100Kbytes, and 60Kbits&#x2F;sec per client. It shouldn&#x27;t take any more horsepower than that to take four kilobytes from the disk and send them to the network once a second for each of ten thousand clients. (That works out to $0.30 per client, by the way. Those $100&#x2F;client licensing fees some operating systems charge are starting to look a little heavy!) So hardware is no longer the bottleneck.<p>(<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19990508164301&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kegel.com&#x2F;c10k.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19990508164301&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kegel.c...</a>)<p>If we haven&#x27;t fixed the C10k problem with 17 years of hardware advancements, it&#x27;s a pretty poor reflection on software engineering.