I was just looking into some low budget mini-itx solutions and I was wondering if anybody on here is running seriously underpowered servers - 1ghz processors, 512mb ram kind of setups. and if so - what kind of loads do you get out of those machines?
for static content such low-end machines can serve millions of hits even daily. You just need to optimize configuration .... of the server, it's network stack and daemon config.
I guess you are speaking about the VIA EPIA things...yes, I was considering to have one such at home and make it a linux box...but not available here.
From my reading and research, it actually wouldn't be much of a cost difference to set up low powered (slow) pentium boxes, the disadvantage being power consumption and rack density - but the advantage being that even really really cheap pentium chips outperform the Epias. Epias do stand out as great solutions for scalable storage capacity though, and of course single purpose boxes like firewalls and load balancers. For most servers out there, they can meet throughput demands.