> So to me, your behavior made you come off as yet another one of those assholes who's only goal is to troll. Now that you're actually collecting numbers and participating in the debate I'll start to listen.

Let me get this straight, if the numbers I collect aren't to your liking then I'm a troll and it's all FUD and if I confirm the figures that you come up with then I'm realistic and you'll start listening?

And you call yourself a scientist?

Come on man, you can do a whole lot better than that.

Those numbers from yesterday are just as valid as the ones that I presented today, both were measured to the best of my ability and I'm willing to back up both sets with more research if that's what is required.

You make the classic mistake of attacking the messenger and not the message when you don't agree with the contents of he message and you do so in a way that is a combination of handwaving and bullying that is not becoming of you.

You might think that people listen to the greatest assholes rather than to the people with the well reasoned arguments but you have to ask yourself if you want groupies and yes-men or people that you can learn from and that can learn from you as your audience.

Admittedly that might make you less of a 'rock star hero', but it's easy to be one of those to an audience of wannabes.

You're a pretty good coder, but you're not above making mistakes and in this case I think you've made several, including assuming that everybody that criticises you doesn't know what they're talking about. Suprise, some do.

Now you have to go and wonder what else it is that you're missing. If you program open source code you have to deal with a lot of flak, so I can see where your defensive response is coming from.

However, the first time I wrote a single-threaded asynchronous polling web front end (in 1998) I spent an awful lot of time analysing the traffic before I wrote code and it is based on that and lots of more recent work (such as building a CDN for a very highly trafficked website) that I criticised your decision to work on this now as premature optimisation, and all the other research that I've dug up in the last two days seems to confirm that, at least as far as I can tell.

So, go do your 'superpoll' thing. But unless you plan on having an open mind and being in 'receive' rather than 'send' mode all the time you probably shouldn't call it science.

And then, when you've done your superpoll thing and you test the hell out of it and you conclude that it was worth it I'll be suitably impressed and I'll apologise to you for being right where I was wrong. I couldn't care less, I've been wrong before and even though I have a bunch of data to back up my statements I still call it 'my opinion' in stead of calling it science.

Note that none of the above is a personal attack on you, so if you could refrain from further personal attacks on me or anybody else that is critical of your work (and not of you) then that would be a dramatic improvement.

Oh, and thanks for the work on Mongrel2, and any other work that you've done in the past on open source projects, I wished I was selfless enough to write code and throw it out into the world only to get flak in return, I often wonder how guys like you, Linus, Guido and so on manage to do it.