Originally Posted by QTbucks_Mark

I would say that those "almost all" didn't have much clue what they were talking about. How much traffic your server can handle really depends on what kind of data you are serving...

If it's a webserver and there is only static content like images, videos and plain HTML you don't need much hardware to get a couple hundred Mbps, as long as the disks keep up or the server can cache the data in memory.
Hell, I run some boxes acting as fileserver which regularly saturate their gigabit uplinks pushing data around inside a cluster.

From my experience bandwidth doesn't matter much when trying to compare webserver performance. Take a look at how many requests/second and/or concurrent request it can handle - that's where it get's interesting.

I would say doing 500 Mbps isn't that impressive. Doing it with dynamicaly generated content, averaging at a couple thousand requests/sec on the other hand is.

regards,
Markus