[snowwrestler]

If we go back to 1998, maybe network throughput was the limiting factor that drove up concurrent connections and killed servers. But I also don't think we can say nginx solved that, since nginx didn't start seeing wide usage until about 10 years later.

I guess I wrote what I did because the comparison to Slowloris seemed to over-emphasize the importance of handling high numbers of concurrent connections, since that is the only mitigation for Slowloris.

But, for a flood of real traffic, concurrent connections and throughput are related. The faster your web server can serve responses, the fewer concurrent connections it will need to handle. And as the percentage of dynamic DB-backed sites has increased over time, so has the value of caching. Basic page caching can speed up a Wordpress blog by hundreds of times for unauth'd users, for example. For most little sites, implementing caching will get them more than installing nginx.

And really, what good are valid concurrent connections if the throughput isn't there? For most users, a site that waits 5 minutes on a blank page is no better than a server that's down.