[xenob]

Yes assembly/machine language can provide most performance but was a nightmare to write and maintain. Sounds like someone is just fishing for funding. Why would you not scale up to support that many connections with the added benefit of balancing and redundancy.

[ShadowAce]

It does sounds rather nightmarish. Each machine (due to various options or omissions) would essentially be unique--thus you'd have to write for that specific machine.

It doesn't sound maintainable at all.

[Mr. Jeeves]

Why would you not scale up to support that many connections with the added benefit of balancing and redundancy.

Exactly. Hardware is cheap - even cheaper than a whole team of Indian H1B's. :)

[OneWingedShark]

Yes assembly/machine language can provide most performance but was a nightmare to write and maintain.

Here's an interesting article on Ada outperforming an experienced assembly programmer.
The thing about optimizing compilers is that they can be 'taught' all sorts of "tricks" that the experienced assembly guy might not know.

Sounds like someone is just fishing for funding. Why would you not scale up to support that many connections with the added benefit of balancing and redundancy.

Balancing and redundancy are good, but the Unix philosophy is rather hostile to the thing that would unlock the full potential: distributed computing. Remember that that OS is heavily reliant-on/intertwined-with C, and C's take on even threads is more of a "let the user [programmer] handle them" (i.e. "fork")... with distributed computing one could have the tasking system assign the task to the system with the lowest load [i.e. maintain a priority-queue]. ~~ I'm not sure, but I seem to recall IBM's OS/360 has the ability to keep services going while a particular machine (node) is under repair/replacement, VMS probably has that ability too.