I always thought the network performance of Linux was great, but in testing the new ftp archive server at work I found out that was wrong. Hitting it with apachebench for massive downloads of the same .iso file resulted in kernel messages about dropped tcp connections. With a simple google search on "TCP: drop open request from" I found a page with Linux network performance tuning tips. Those tips improved things: iso images flew out at wirespeed (gigabit). Lots of concurrent requests for a small file are still an issue, those stuck at somewhere above 1600 hits/second, way below wirespeed. It will do for the moment ;)