Naturally, a major concern is performance.
Performance is a slippery issue for Web servers, and the topic of some debate on the Internet.
Well, that turns out to be the wrong question to ask. This approach is more useful in that it addresses the capacity of a WWW server to transmit large numbers of files. Simultaneously serving one hundred files may sound impressive unless you discover that each file takes ten minutes to be transfered. Just to make things more complicated, consider the effect of transmitting multiple files of varying sizes to different users connected at a variety of speeds. Under these conditions, a server's ability to juggle multiple simultaneous connections and make efficient use of the CPU time available becomes crucial.